II. Mass Media: Collaborators with Terrorists?(Terrorism and Mass Media‪)‬

Recent changes in mass media In the course of the last decade revolutionary changes have occurred in the mass media, especially in the news media. These changes have been sketched by Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, and Professor of communication theory at the Universite Denis-Diderot (Paris-VII) (Ramonet 2002). Growing in parallel with increasingly fierce competition and commercial pressures and complicated by the fact that "many top media executives today come from the corporate world, and no longer from the ranks of journalists," has been the burgeoning dominance of the visual. Television has become the leading news medium, with newspapers only supplementary to TV's instant, live, emotional coverage. Ramonet feels that "we are at a turning point in the history of information" in which TV news shows "have set up a kind of new equation for news, which can be summed up like this: 'if the emotion you feel by looking at the pictures on TV news programmes is true, then the news is true.'" This has given rise