Locking Horns Over Terror Coverage

Days before the first apartment blast rocked Moscow in 1999, a wired watermelon truck blew up in the southern city of Buinaksk, killing 56 people. A similar bomb in a second truck, parked near a military base, was defused after a resident informed police that two suspicious wires were hanging from the vehicle.

Journalists covered the event thoroughly, including descriptions of the explosive device.

Did they do the right thing? That was the issue debated Wednesday at a conference on media coverage of violent attacks and its impact on public safety.

"These wires helped uncover the explosives. If the public is informed about this, next time, the terrorists will be careful to better conceal the bomb," Oleg Nechiporenko, head of the National Anti-Criminal and Anti-Terrorist Foundation, or NAAF, told reporters.

Journalists countered that only through news coverage can people know what to look out for.

The conference -- held less than a week after a terrorist blast in Kaspiisk claimed the lives of 42 people -- was organized by the Russian Union of Journalists and NAAF, a think tank formed in February by members of the State Duma's security committee and retired law enforcement veterans.

Its stated goal was to help create guidelines for Russian journalists writing about terrorism. Ultimately, however, the round table amounted to a rap session where participants discussed tough moral choices faced by reporters and aired complaints about the incompetence of both journalists and government agency spokesmen.

"In 1995, Shamil Basayev told me he had a nuclear bomb that he was ready to set off in Moscow," recalled Gennady Zhavoronkov, a journalist with the respected Obshchaya Gazeta weekly. "The information was absolutely impossible to check. I didn't publish it. But can you imagine the panic in Moscow if I had included it in my report?"

Nechiporenko, a retired KGB colonel, warned that journalists should not describe any technical details of the way attacks are carried out.

"Do reporters understand that such descriptions can serve as models for people with damaged psyches?" he asked.

Nechiporenko also said that gory footage from the scene of an attack only serves to promote violence among aggressive or mentally unstable individuals.

Vladimir Borev, editor of Sovetnik Presidenta newspaper, agreed, noting the difference in the way Western and Russian media cover the aftermath of deadly attacks.

"There were no close-ups of victims in the U.S. media reports of the [Sept. 11] attack," Borev said. Coverage of the Kaspiisk tragedy, however, repeatedly featured blood-covered victims. "This is real informational terrorism," he said.

Borev also complained about Russian media's close attention to the Kursk tragedy, saying they "tracked every dead body from the wreckage to the grave."

Pavel Gutiontov, secretary of the journalists' union, quickly retorted: "If a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda hadn't bribed an officer at navy headquarters to get a list of the victims ... I doubt the president would have gone to Murmansk to see the victims' relatives."

But journalists were not the only ones criticized Wednesday.

According to Alexander Mikhailov, a former chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, part of the blame for poor coverage of terrorism lies with the inept press services of law enforcement agencies.

"The media are held hostage by them," he said. "Press services ... try to squeeze journalists into an information corridor they control, which only leads to an aversion [to official spokesmen]."

Mikhailov added that careless statements made by officials after terrorist attacks often frighten the public more than horrifying media reports.

"Sergei Yastrzhembsky [the Kremlin's chief spokesman on Chechnya] often says after an attack that his office had information about preparations for the attack," Mikhailov said. "After such statements, people wonder why nobody acted [to prevent the attack], and they never get any answer."

Repeated requests for comment sent to the FSB press service went unanswered Wednesday.