The endless reruns of vision from inside the Arena stadium as terrified concertgoers made for the exits ensured the extremists’ message that a place of assumed safety could become a charnel house was spread far and wide.

The smartphones carried by teens reported the bombing in real time but with no filter.  

“How could they do this to children?” was a question repeated in homes and workplaces across the world. The realisation “they” could and would has sowed seeds of unease in parents’ minds across the Western world. 

Just as the smartphone and social media have become the recruiting tool for Islamic State, Manchester demonstrated they also work extremely effectively as propaganda weapons.

The challenge for the media is to avoid amplifying the terror. The story needs to be told but how it’s told can have a bearing on whether it’s repeated. 

The challenge is particularly pertinent to television. Even during scheduled nightly news bulletins, the images of panic-stricken kids fleeing the scene were repeated several times in each story. News directors need to pause and ask themselves if that is really necessary. Does it help in the telling of the story? Or does it do the terrorists’ job for them? Will it motivate radicalised viewers to take the next step towards mass murder?

Channels repeated the same imagery ad nauseum. Digital coverage was more measured. Readers at least had to make the conscious decision to watch the smartphone footage by clicking on it.  

The media is urged to be careful in the way it reports suicide so it doesn’t encourage others. The same approach is needed when reporting terrorism. 

It was heartening to hear our own Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull refer to the bombing as the act of a criminal. That’s exactly what it was. Not the act of a “soldier of the caliphate”, as proclaimed by Daesh.  Mass murder, plain and simple.

We need a counter narrative to that hawked by radical extremists to unstable people looking for meaning in their lives. Reporting terrorism without lionising it is a challenge all in the media must rise to, to report the news but not build the terrorism brand.  JOHN HANSCOMBE