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errorists are also celebrities. The media popularizes them. Through TV we witness how the “hunted” and the “hunter” often sit side by side in talk shows.

This fact reminds us of Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he says life is a sort of theater. Goffman uses the dramaturgical metaphor
of the stage and details how this could be achieved in social life on a daily basis.

Goffman’s basic thesis hinges on the assumption that everybody in his social circle tries to oppose a certain figure within him and plays it like an actor, because he knows he is being watched.

Does Goffman’s thesis apply to this terrorism phenomenon? Broadcasts on terrorism now pervade our family rooms through different packages of TV programs. Terrorists we once knew only from traces of their violence, become so close, like characters in a TV drama.

We even no longer feel scared of their appearances and sometimes accept their reasons for acts of cruelty. This is the risk of giving the floor to perpetrators of violence to explain their acts.

Why do the media give the impression of ambivalence and apply double standards in reporting on terrorism?

How should we “read” the indirect mutual symbiosis between terrorists and the media? What should we criticize in reading the media culture, especially television?

I’m sure the first question of what terrorists and terrorism mean constitutes a challenge of its own. Terrorism has very broad and diverse definitions.

Does terrorism mean a group of resistance to the state, certain communities or ideologies? Or does it imply a group of resistance maintained by part of a country? I have no pretension to define it.

I use the term to refer to an organization that uses of terror and
violence and threatens the peace and order of other people in achieving its objective. It is something
we have agreed to oppose from the beginning.

The media have a distinctive culture in which images, sounds and lenses help produce patterns of daily life. In the view of Douglas Kellner, an expert in media philosophy, the media not only dominate spare time but also shape political opinions and social attitudes while providing the material for the building of one’s personal identity.

As a target of terrorism and with its industrial culture, the media become a strategic means of communicating ideas, ideologies and justification of acts of violence committed.

At first, many believed that the media serve as a battlefield of terrorism when the Black Septem-ber terrorist group kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972.

This group in fact didn’t attack Israel or cause military damage in Israel. They just wanted to tell the world that they existed and could terrorize anybody, even disrupting the process of the Olympic Games.

But after Sept. 11, 2001 there has been a shift in the goal, method and field implementation. The media no longer constitute a battlefield but rather a target of terrorism. The aims of terrorism are no longer merely individuals but also infrastructure, world institutions, mostly Western and especially American establishments.

And they need media as one of their targets to announce it all. It’s not just terrorism remains, but the presence has consequences for their ideological adversaries to bear.

The shift and difficulty in facing this problem is interesting to examine, notably with the widespread terrorist acts in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities.

In this context, the interests of both sides meet. On the one hand the media not only need to offer
accurate and important reports to society, but also to be engaged in competition among media channels to boost the “sale value” of their news.

Rating is one of their reasons. Anyway, we should understand that media culture amounts to industrial culture.

In terms of industrial culture, violence remains appealing and has a high sale value, especially due to detailed descriptions of organizational mystery, operational networks and field strategies. It’s this “detail and difference” that prompts the media to compete in presenting terrorism in diverse packages.

On the other hand, terrorists need the media as one of their instruments of struggle. And they know the media’s character and operation well. Violence becomes a meeting point between the two.

The media’s concrete problem is perhaps the tendency to adopt an objective, neutral and impartial position, even when it pits the interests of our society on one side against those of terrorists on the other. The cover-both-sides code becomes interesting to weigh up.

In my opinion, covering both sides is not the bottom line of news coverage. The growing threat of transnational crime makes it necessary for us to view the code from a different perspective and in a different context. Terrorism, heavily laden with violence in its operation, naturally is not something to be granted tolerance.

Besides, the media at the same time accidentally make use of terrorists’ violence to criticize the government for its failure and inability to overcome terrorism.

Actually it is crucial to consolidate cooperation between the government and the media in fighting terrorism. The media should not be trapped by “whatever is said” by terrorists, while ignoring “what will result from” their violence against human safety.

It may be necessary to ask: Can we accept not only the reality that we are now at war with terrorism, but also the need to understand that there are always two sides, we and terrorists?

If their side prevails, our freedom will be gone, and the first freedom to be lost is that of the press. Is it too much, in the current war on terrorism, for us to ask the media to side with us?

Communication between the government and the media is an important element in the strategy designed to prevent terrorism, also in the preservation of democracy.

But it should also be understood that terrorism and democracy are not a combination of stable elements.

If terrorism is self-supporting or growing, the freedom of citizens will be reduced, while in a society under an authoritarian ideology, thuggery system or radical religious extremism, the free press is one of the first institutions to be victimized.

Indeed, this seems to be a dilemma that cannot be fully resolved. The keyword is that we must never tolerate violence.

We are often ambivalent toward many things. On the one hand we suggest the application of justice, honesty and compassion. But on the other hand the media frequently bombard us with pictures and texts depicting death, poverty, destruction and blood, without presenting their whole conditions.

Propaganda may be alluring, but it should be realized that “the best propaganda is truth”. And we need to be always alert that the media as one of the pillars of democracy should never be lost, as this pillar may unobtrusively be get out of our hands, only to be felt when completely gone.