Press concedes Breivik's pictures may remain the defining images of tragedy

VISITORS TO the Oslo offices of Norwegian tabloid VGcan experience first-hand the shocking aftermath of Friday's bombing. The glazed lobby is empty and abandoned, covered with shattered glass from broken windows that glints dangerously in the midday sun.

The office block in central Oslo lay within the blast range of last Friday’s bomb that wrecked nearby government buildings. No newspaper staff was injured in the blast, although shaken journalists had to decamp to a nearby hotel to get the paper out.

“They’re hoping to get the glass cleared up and the main entrance open next Monday,” said Padraig Woods from Durrow, Co Laois, head of mobile application development at the company.

For now, staff enter through a back door, past a watchful guard. They are not just working on a huge news story, but grappling with a massive dilemma.

For at least three days after Friday’s massacre, the world saw perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik exactly as he wanted to be seen. Hours before the attacks he released a 1,500-page manifesto containing political diatribes to bomb-making instructions – but also media management advice.

As a one-man propaganda department, he knew the photographs and material he released on the internet were bait the international media couldn't resist. For Norwegian tabloid newspapers like VG, where pictures often tell the story, it was a particularly troubling dilemma.

"On the one hand we needed to identify him and these pictures were there with a certain news value but, on the other hand, we don't want to be part of his game plan," said Espen Egil Hansen, VG's digital editor-in-chief.

Breivik released two sets of pictures: professional, airbrushed portraits and “regalia” images in combat gear and weapons he had taken at home to avoid attracting suspicion. Despite the “lack of professional digital equipment”, a confident Breivik writes that these “regalia” pictures can be touched up to an acceptable level “with my Photoshop skills”.

VGeditor Hansen recalls lively debate with staff – and readers – earlier this week over the images.

“People starting calling and e-mailing saying not to use the material, that we’re playing his game,” he said.

Over at the competing Dagbladet, similar debates have raged over Breivik's material.

"We've decided that we won't understand very much of this if we don't take the ideological part of his manifesto seriously, even if they are the parts he didn't write himself," said Dagbladetjournalist Simen Ekern.

For Dr Gillian Doyle, a visiting professor of media economy at Oslo University, the debate has overtones of Margaret Thatcher’s IRA broadcast ban in the 1980s.

In the Breivik case, however, she says normally clear lines are blurred. “The profile of the perpetrator in some senses makes it difficult to deploy the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric that typifies coverage of terrorism,” she said.

“That [normally] allows distance and differentiation to be established from ‘foreign’ elements usually associated with atrocities such as 9/11 or the July 7th bombing.”

Anxious to neutralise Breivik's propaganda coup, Norway's newspapers have hurried to gather alternative images of him – including many of the less-than- flattering kind. VGhas new rules forbidding the use of Breivik's images without strict management approval.

"In some cases now," said VGeditor Hansen, "we'd rather use no picture of him at all than his own." By getting in first, however, many Norwegian journalists accept that Breivik's own images may remain the defining images of this tragedy.

"It's an extremely difficult situation in a story that has been very difficult to cover," Dagbladet's Ekern said.