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 the teens at the venue 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 and its affiliates, Manchester demonstrated they also work extremely effectively as propaganda weapons.

The challenge for the media in reporting the crime is to avoid inadvertently 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?

Twenty-four hour news channels, which have to fill hours of vision, repeated the same imagery ad nauseum. 

Digital coverage of the atrocity was much more measured. Readers at least had to make the conscious decision to watch the smartphone footage by clicking on it.  

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

How politicians respond to these outrages is also important. 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.

Counter-terrorism specialists agree there is a need for a strong counter narrative to that hawked by radical extremists to unstable people looking for meaning in their lives – “losers”, as Donald Trump called them.

Integral to that counter-narrative is an approach to reporting terrorism in a manner that avoids lionising it. It’s a challenge to which all of us in the media need to rise. We have a dual responsibility: to report the news but not build the terrorism brand.