The Globe and Mail's Lawrence Martin offers some thoughts on how the media should handle terrorism and security stories.

From The Globe and Mail: (must be a subscriber or Globe Insider)

The media cannot be in the business of censoring news. To cut off the terrorists' supply of oxygen, to deprive them of headlines, would be ideal in that it would frustrate them beyond belief. The psychological victory would be our own. But, while there is occasional media co-operation with authorities in limiting the release of security information, news is news. It's going to get out.

But the temperature has to be lowered. Journalism can't be about censorship, but it can be about perspective. Journalists can start to come to grips with the likelihood that overexposure is aiding the terrorist cause - and they can take steps to do something about it.

They can play news stories about terrorism more modestly - on the inside pages, say. High up in the stories, they can insert background reminders to the effect that, in terms of threats, of leading causes of death, terrorism ranks about 250th, or whatever the statistic happens to be.

The stories can draw far more on historical perspective to show that terrorism has always been around in one form or another and that any comparison of the terrorism threat of today to the Nazi or Soviet threat is excess in the extreme.

The media, particularly in the United States, can be more skeptical about parroting the fear talk of political leaders who see advantage in such talk. It was fear, threat inflation that went uncorrected by the American media, that helped trigger the Iraq war.

In the media business, it is often said that perspective is our most important product. Nowadays, when we can be used as a weapon in the terrorist arsenal, it has never been more true.

As an aside, one of the Globe's advertising slogans has been "perspective is everything."