"The media implant fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the U.S. ... what enemies of the U.S. cannot do, its media are doing!(...) Bin Laden's rise to prominence mirrors the latest phase in the Information Age, the techniques of which he has adroitly mastered. In a 10-year period from 1994 to 2004 that coincides with the emergence of a virtual universe — moving from print to the Internet, from wired to wireless communication around the globe — bin Laden has crafted a series of carefully staged statements designed for new media. They include interviews with Western and Arab journalists, handwritten letters scanned onto discs, faxes, and audiotapes, and above all video recordings distributed via the first independent Arabic-language news outlet, the Qatari satellite television station Al-Jazeera. Those are the texts that were sent to me and proposed as the core of a volume dedicated to making informed critical discussion of Osama's outlook possible for a broader public, one not limited to secretive government agencies and counterterrorism experts." Story at chronicle.com by Bruce B. Lawrence, "professor of Islamic studies at Duke University. He has edited and written an introduction to Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, to be published by Verso this month."