Osama bin Laden.

It would be difficult to find someone for whom this name does not evoke images, emotions, memories, desires, beliefs. Even years after his death in 2011, Osama bin Laden’s name conjures up a complex array of narratives and representational structures. Depending on one’s location—geographically, politically, religiously—the name invokes stories of evil, bravery, destruction, retribution, deception, truth-telling, cowardice, courage. The name—“Osama bin Laden”—goes far beyond the man—Osama bin Laden—and extends well beyond his death.

In 1998, American Broadcasting Company journalist John Miller wrote that “the American people, by and large, do not know the name Usama [sic] bin Laden, but they soon will.”¹ With tragic prescience, Miller’s prediction chronicled the passage of Osama bin Laden from a relative unknown to one of the world’s most immediately recognized figures.

Before the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a third target in Washington, D.C., Osama bin Laden’s name was known in limited circles. Within Saudi Arabia, he was known as one of four children of the pious and hardworking Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a billionaire construction magnate who earned his wealth by constructing some of Saudi Arabia’s most iconic buildings. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan, where he became known in broader circles as a wealthy supporter of the anti-Soviet Muslim forces in Afghanistan, eventually earning a reputation for himself on the battlefield. In 1998, as the founder of Al Qaeda—“the base”—he became known more broadly through the work done by Al Qaeda, most vividly in the attacks in 1998 on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, and then in 2000 on the USS Cole as it sat anchored in a harbor in Yemen, resulting in combined deaths of hundreds of people.

For many around the world, however, his association with 9/11 was the first they had heard of Osama bin Laden. On September 11, 2001, CBS News journalist Jim Stewart linked Osama bin Laden’s name as a probable source of the attacks as early as 9:17 a.m. (EST), a mere thirty-one minutes after the first World Trade Center attack. During that same period, bin Laden was mentioned on Howard Stern’s radio show in connection with the World Trade Center attacks.² With an unprecedented rapidity made possible by media and the Internet, Osama bin Laden soon became “the most wanted man in the world,” going from being “the world’s most notorious terrorist into one of the leading newsmakers—indeed the leading newsmaker.”³

If bin Laden was not broadly known to media audiences before 9/11, it was not through a lack of effort on his part. Christina Hellmich remarks that bin Laden “was vying for attention … from the early 1990s,” while Andrew Hill notes that bin Laden was making himself “available to Western journalists,” using video appearances “to seek to sway Western public opinion.”⁴ Hellmich points to the period preceding 9/11 as particularly media-focused for bin Laden: “interviews with Western-based journalists, fatwas, open letters and public statements aired via Al Jazeera, by which bin Laden was attempting to establish a public image.”⁵ Whether, indeed, bin Laden was the “leader of a global terrorist network at this point,” Hellmich concludes, “it is clear that this was precisely the image he wanted to communicate to both journalists and the wider audience.”⁶ By all accounts, bin Laden was very conscious of the role that media played in the achievement of his goals, and he intentionally used media—whether interviews, video-taped speeches, or distributed statements—to achieve those ends. An Al Qaeda associate remarked that “Sheikh Osama knows that the media war is not less important than the military war against America.”⁷ Analyst Jeremy White concluded that bin Laden’s “status as the most wanted man on the planet was enough to get him airtime on every major news network whenever he wished.”⁸ Indeed, it can be argued that global media made Osama bin Laden possible. Some associates of bin Laden even worried that he gave too much attention to the media. Mustafa Setmaerian (Abu Musab Al Suri) wrote in an email to bin Laden on July 19, 1999, that he “has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.”⁹

Perhaps the most powerful indication that bin Laden was aware of the role that media would play on 9/11 was the timing of the two airline collisions with the World Trade Center towers, an event in which, to use Brigitte Nacos’s words, “9/11 terrorists outperformed Hollywood.”¹⁰ Indeed, the seventeen minutes between the attack on the North and South Towers insured that, while media did not telecast the first crash, they were riveted by the second. By the time the second plane flew into the South Tower, both CNN and MSNBC, along with local New York networks, were televising the scene at the World Trade Center, positioning millions of viewers to watch the second plane fly into the South Tower. Real-time images were transmitted beyond the United States, with the BBC showing the World Trade Center on its website, making the attacks a global media event in real time. Peter L. Bergen reports that bin Laden told his companions who were watching the televised images: “If he [the newsreader] says: ‘We have just received this …’ it means the brothers have struck.” Knowing that the second attack was to come, he advised them, “be patient.”¹¹

Bin Laden was not, of course, the first to understand the symbiotic relationship between media and terrorism. Ayman Al Zawahiri, named leader of Al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death, wrote in a personal letter in 2005 that “we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”¹² Senior Al Qaeda strategist al-Suri (Mustafa Setmariam Nasar) stated that jihad itself was best understood “as a comprehensive war, where its soldiers employ military, political, media, civil and ideological tools.”¹³ Citing a manual of the Afghan Jihad used in Al Qaeda training camps, Brigitte Nacos remarks that “publicity was (and most probably still is) an overriding consideration in planning terrorist acts.”¹⁴ As Ibrahim Seaga Shaw summarized, “the relationship between terrorism and media [is] one of “symbiosis,” in which terrorism’s primary aim is media coverage.”¹⁵ Bin Laden himself is reported to have told the Taliban leader Mullah Omar that “up to 90 percent of his battle was fought in the media.”¹⁶ Indeed, an Al Qaeda writer celebrated the cost-saving impact of media in propagating the end point of terrorism—the creation of fear: “The giant American media machine was defeated in a judo strike from Sheikh bin Laden. CNN cameras and other media dinosaurs took part in framing the attacks and spreading the fear, without costing al-Qaeda a dime.”¹⁷

A few days after September 11, 2001, while on a visit to the Pentagon, President Bush declared: “I want justice. And there’s an old poster out west, that I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’”¹⁸ Revealing that bin Laden was not the only political actor to understand the value of conveying messages through the media, he followed these words by saying, “The Taleban [sic] must take my statements seriously.”¹⁹ Osama bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011, was the culmination of almost a decade of efforts by the U.S. government to find him, “dead or alive.” Tony Blinken, Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, pointed to the importance of bin Laden in the U.S. government’s political calculus when he said that “a number of people felt that half—if not more—of the success we would achieve [in capturing or killing bin Laden] would be the world knowing that bin Laden was gone.”²⁰ The final raid of bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was itself a carefully orchestrated media event. The highly controlled nature of the mission by the now-famous U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 included a mindful decision about how to confirm bin Laden’s death through a series of photographic images taken on-site before the team left Abbottabad. The power of bin Laden’s image was a conscious factor in determining that there was a need for proof of death that was not itself an incitement to vengeance.²¹ The U.S. government claims to have fifty-nine photos of bin Laden dead. Legal controversy surrounds these photos, with claims for their release becoming the subject of decisions by the U.S. District Court and now the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C.²² A search on the Internet quickly shows a photo of bin Laden—dead, beaten, and bloodied. However, the image, which circulated online for more than two years after bin Laden’s death, is a fake, an amalgamation of a photograph of the face of another man who had been beaten and the face of bin Laden.²³ The “real” bin Laden continues to be elusive even after his death; in Andrew Hill’s words in this volume, bin Laden continues to “haunt” the Internet in ambivalent versions of himself.

Bin Laden’s continued power as a cultural and political icon is shown in the conspiracy theories about his death that populate the Internet. Numerous voices in the media ask, “Is bin Laden really dead?” Political commentator Glenn Beck, on the day after bin Laden’s death was announced, offered on his radio show this rambling speculation:

There is something bothering me and it has to do with the helicopter crash. Getting Osama Bin Laden out, and the fact that we know that Wikileaks says that al-Qaeda has nukes. And here we have the head of al-Qaeda and we shoot him. Reports coming from the Pentagon, he was unarmed. Now why would we shoot a guy? Did we get the information? Could we have done anything with that? Were poll numbers involved, or are we seeing a show? Is it possible that Osama Bin Laden has been ghosted out of his compound, and we’re seeing a show at this point? Watch the other hand. Watch the other hand.²⁴

While Beck wonders if bin Laden was actually killed, others believe that bin Laden had been dead for some time and that he was “re-killed” on May 2. Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan posted a lengthy blog about bin Laden in which she asserts the “re-killing” of bin Laden: “I have written over and over on my Facebook wall since this whole farce began that, even though I don’t believe one word of the story yesterday, there are many things that OBL could be, but being killed yesterday by Navy SEALS was not one of them.”²⁵. Radio talk show host and blogger Alex Jones has claimed for some time that bin Laden died in 2002 and that “his corpse would be dragged out at the most politically expedient moment.”²⁶ Irish pop musician Jim Corrs even created a parody movie poster: “Osama Zombie 6: They dug him up and killed him again.”²⁷

In slightly over twenty years, Osama bin Laden went from being a relatively unknown wealthy Saudi to the world’s “most wanted man.” Global media made this shift—and the impact of bin Laden’s actions around the world—possible.²⁸ Whether through the dissemination of bin Laden’s ideas to those who followed and were inspired by him, or the provocation of fear among those who witnessed the terrorist attacks he organized, global media played the part of both witness and actor in the Global War on Terrorism. We can rephrase what Rohit Chopra says of Barack Obama to apply to bin Laden, that “media have been central to the processes by which the world and bin Laden have come to know each other.”²⁹ The essays in this volume do not attempt to show how the global media represented bin Laden accurately or inaccurately but instead to use the figure “Osama bin Laden” as a window into the operations of global media in its relationship to the Global War on Terror.

There are numerous (contesting) biographies available that attempt to narrate bin Laden’s life, whether from the point of view of how he came to lead Al Qaeda, of explaining “what went wrong” (how did the son of a successful Saudi family come to lead the world’s most famous terrorist group), of how he was influenced by others (Zarkawi), of what he was like with his family, and so on. An increasing number of books are dedicated to the events surrounding bin Laden’s life and death, and there are books that contain bin Laden’s speeches and statements.³⁰

It is not the intention of the essays in this volume to “define” Osama bin Laden. Indeed, representations of bin Laden are contradictory and shaped by the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious contexts of their authors. In looking at bin Laden’s biography, Christina Hellmich asks: “Was Osama bin Laden an engineer, a business-school graduate, a playboy or a university drop-out?”³¹ Media representations cross the spectrum: as leader of Al Qaeda, was he “the most wanted man in the world” or a “beatific” leader?³² While the dominant narrative in Western countries was of bin Laden as evil, Pew Research polls in the world’s six predominantly Muslim countries showed majority favorable impressions of bin Laden in the years after 9/11: 72 percent in the Palestinian Territories, 59 percent in Indonesia, and 56 percent in Jordan.³³ The ambivalent nature of bin Laden’s presence is captured on a T-shirt for sale in New York soon after 9/11. Next to the popular “Bin Laden—dead or alive” phrase was one that declared “Bin Laden—dead and alive.”³⁴ The competing perceptions of bin Laden in the global media have led to a sense that his representations in media are themselves indistinct. Matt Frei of BBC1 called bin Laden “Al Qaeda’s spectral anchorman,” and Andrew Hill refers to bin Laden’s “shape-shifting capacities.”³⁵

While it is one of the premises of this volume that there is not a single, knowable bin Laden, it is also not the case that the essays in this volume subscribe to a strategy of confusion; instead they focus on location and specificity. As authors in this volume show, media depictions of bin Laden not only diverge but often contradict each other depending upon the media provider (U.S. news or Al Jazeera), the global location of the viewer (United States, Europe, Pakistan, or India), the viewer’s religious perspective and context (Muslim or Christian), or the media format (mainstream journalism versus gaming). These essays show that there are not multiple “bin Ladens” but instead multiple locations for representing and receiving “bin Laden.” These multiple locations participate in what Arjun Appadurai has called “mediascapes,” referring both to “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information … And to the images of the world created by these media,” meaning that they “involve complicated inflections, depending on their mode …, their hardware …, their audiences … and the interests of those who own and control them.”³⁶ Several essays pointedly compare the representations of bin Laden across national boundaries, religious perspectives, and media formats, concluding that who bin Laden is depends very much upon who controls the media coverage about him.

W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us that “images have social lives,” and that “they are capable of detaching themselves from pictorial support and finding—potentially limitless—new hosts.”³⁷ The authors in this volume underscore this point about images—of bin Laden, his wives, of other global figures—showing how their “lives” are taken up by seemingly contradictory producers and audiences. In approaching images, Mitchell advises us that if we wish “to locate them, give them an address, then the challenge is to place them, and to see them as landscapes or spaces.”³⁸ By contributing to the articulation of the “landscapes” that are “Osama bin Laden,” the essays in this volume inform our understanding and critique of today’s global media landscape.

Why does this matter? Savvy users of the Internet today know that there are few individuals, issues, or images that have only one story associated with them and that media outlets themselves often present very different versions of the same events (think Fox News and MSNBC in the United States). What makes the stories about bin Laden distinctive is that these conflicting images and narratives are not just confusing or distracting; they have profound impacts on actions and policies around the world. In the Global War on Terrorism, Helga Tawil-Souri reminds us, “certain representations have become dominant and hegemonic, and shape the way in which reality is imagined and acted upon” to the extent that “it has become increasingly impossible to conceptualize reality in other ways.”³⁹ This is a point reiterated by several authors in this volume. The impact of this conceptualization of reality is that nations, armies, citizens, and communities are mobilized, located, and reconfigured in their relationship to the Global War on Terrorism that has redefined the world since 9/11, with Osama bin Laden as the iconic thread that weaves these narratives together. Bin Laden’s images and narratives are used to shape, motivate, justify, and rewrite the stories that are told around the world about terror and the actions that are taken as a result. Consequently, understanding the landscape that is “bin Laden” is more than a media exercise—it is a necessary component of understanding, critiquing, and rethinking the Global War on Terrorism.

More than just being vehicles for representing the Global War on Terrorism, the global media are themselves participants in this war. Donald Rumsfeld marked the distinctive change that media meant for the post-9/11 Global War on Terrorism: “In an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, BlackBerrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions, hand-held video cameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.”⁴⁰ In the face of this new media context, André Nusselder argues that the Global War on Terrorism “is to a large extent a virtual war of images” that is “above all a conflict over the symbolic ordering of the world.”⁴¹ Media have become instrumental in this “virtual war” not only because of their pervasive presence but also because, as Ashley Marie Nellis and Joanne Savage remind us, Americans—and, indeed, many audiences around the world—“rely exclusively on the media for terrorism-related information.”⁴² Few have direct contact with terrorists, terrorist attacks, or those who are victims of them. Andrew Hill astutely calls such audience members “waiting subjects” because of the relationship that terrorism fosters in the media:

The waiting subject is a subject that is prey then to visions and imaginings in ways they attempt to ascertain what is to happen to them. How in the case of Western publics does the waiting subject imagine, conceive of, and comprehend the “distant places” which have figured as pivotal sites in the War on Terror? … How do these publics come to conceive of the relationship … between “the homeland” and the “faraway place”? And in turn, how do these publics come to comprehend the terms in which these faraway places have come to constitute a source of the threats they await?⁴³

Consequently, media play an exceptional role in shaping understandings about who terrorists are (Al Qaeda? The United States?), why they should be feared (“pure evil” or “the Great Satan”), and what kind of fear audiences should feel.

Collectively, the essays in this volume speak to larger academic debates about the communicative relationships between political actors, media, and society. There exists robust research into the normative principles underlying these relationships from areas like political communication and critical terrorism studies. The unique vantage point of this volume, however, arises from using bin Laden and those associated with him as consistent “objects” of analysis across a range of contexts. In doing so, the authors provide opportunities for comparison across media formats, national boundaries, and political viewpoints, revealing in the process the complex operations and intersections of global media. Furthermore, the chapters bring into conversation various disciplinary fields (political science, media studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, etc.), and theoretical angles (such as critical terrorism studies, postcolonial theory, genre theory, feminism, representation, framing, social categorization theory, and narrative theory, to name a few) with the goal of encouraging readers to consider the complexity of debates surrounding bin Laden and the multiplicity of analytical tools with which his legacy is interpreted. By bringing together contributors from around the world who are writing about multiple media formats, from assorted disciplinary perspectives and with varying critical approaches, this volume contributes to increasing our understanding of the role of global media in a post-9/11 world. Because, as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, “We not only think about media, we think in them,” it is imperative that we hone our understanding of how media produce, disperse, mimic, target, sustain, recall, and figure and disfigure those who become the objects of its attentions.

The essays in this volume underscore the point that there is no single “knowable” narrative about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and terrorism. The nature of that unknowability is not a result of yet-to-be-discovered evidence, but rather of limitations in the structures of knowledge that underpin the ways in which we think about and come to “know” terrorism. Global media contribute to those structures of knowledge, not only by disseminating the opinions of others but by structuring and restructuring images and narratives and by contributing to the construction of what comes to be seen as “fact” and “evidence.”

Essays in the first section take on the question of how Osama bin Laden is positioned within structures of meaning that define, target, and enable him. It is here that the epistemology of bin Laden is most directly brought into question. Bin Laden captured the attention of the Western media and politicians by both promoting himself as a political actor and by fitting the expected notions of an individual at the head of a complex organization that is led by a charismatic individual. By looking at him as a political actor, Aditi Bhatia and Andrew Hill examine the force of bin Laden’s own words, both in terms of his direct statements and in terms of the rhetorical structures that inform them. In contrast, Richard Jackson’s essay on the meaning of bin Laden requires that we question the very practice of thinking through political actors. Jackson focuses on the adequacy of the epistemologies that the West has used to define who bin Laden is and, based on these definitions, determine how to act in relation to him.

Richard Jackson’s defining essay, “Bin Laden’s Ghost and the Epistemological Crises of Counterterrorism,” opens this volume because of its seminal framing of analyses about Osama bin Laden and the media. In what may initially seem a counterintuitive move, Jackson argues that bin Laden’s death is meaningless. Jackson’s observation goes beyond what might seem an obvious fact—bin Laden’s death has not meant the disappearance of Al Qaeda, and terrorism did not stop as a result of it—to make a broader and more important point about the way in which knowledge about terrorism is constructed, disseminated, and acted upon: that there is an “epistemological crisis” surrounding the construction of meaning about bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

In the post-9/11 period, Jackson points to the multiple and conflicting narratives of bin Laden and Al Qaeda as evidence of the difficulties of constructing meaning. As he points out, these conflicting narratives result from the use of different sources of evidence and, more importantly, from the ontological conceptions that dictate the kinds of data that are selected. Given the unprecedented global resources that have been committed to “knowing” Al Qaeda, it is astounding that, as Jackson puts it, it remains “an essentially unknown entity.” Consequently, Jackson argues that there is an “adoption of ontological uncertainty as a fundamental condition of terrorism knowledge.” One of the most significant implications of Jackson’s argument is that this uncertainty is more than simply a lamentable situation; it has consequences for political actors. By accepting these uncertainties—what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknown”—as a “fact” of terrorism, political actors are limiting the kinds of information they are willing to consider in decision making. For Jackson, such limitations include “the knowledge generated within the military-intellectual system that anti-American terrorism is primarily caused by U.S. military intervention overseas,” or the conclusion that “terrorists are no longer understandable as political actors.”

A direct result of this epistemological crisis is, Jackson argues, the opening of the space of fantasy as a form of “knowing.” The lack of firm knowledge about bin Laden and Al Qaeda has led to the projection of fantasies to make up for the lack of confirmed meaning. Because bin Laden and Al Qaeda took the world by surprise once, how might they surprise again? Such fantasies—usually the stuff of Hollywood films and thriller novels—show up in Western security practices that respond to imagined terrorist activities such as airport searches of baby diapers or protection of candy machines that could be used by terrorists to spread contaminated food. Jackson puts it most powerfully: “Once it is accepted that we essentially do not know where, when or how terrorists might strike … then the only way to detect and deal with them is to try to imagine what they might do.” To return to the subject of this volume, Jackson argues that bin Laden’s death may heighten the use of fantasy and speculation as tools of analysis and forms of response to terrorism. Without the figure of bin Laden as a focal point of the Global War on Terrorism, and without bin Laden’s own media statements to provide a scaffolding for terrorism narratives, speculation as a mode of thinking may increase.

Aditi Bhatia argues in her chapter, “The Discursive Portrayals of Osama bin Laden,” that the Global War on Terrorism is largely a metaphorical battle whose sides can be represented by the figures of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. While others have also examined the rhetorical similarities between these two men,⁴⁴ Bhatia revisits these ideas to remind readers of the Manichaean tendencies prevalent in both religious and political discourse. Focusing on three dominant dichotomies—Good versus Evil, Civilization versus Barbarism, and Moral Justice versus Retribution—Bhatia shows how the rhetoric used by both figures shows similar structure and patterns, with each side positioning the other as evil, barbaric, and immoral. Because global media remain dominated by the West and by the narratives employed by its producers, Bhatia’s essay is an important reminder that “the other” not only has a voice but also articulates its positions in similar dichotomies.

Bhatia’s chief focus in her essay is on the ways in which both bin Laden and Bush use religious discourse to achieve similar goals: “the objectification of their individual, ideologically simulated conceptualizations of reality.” Bin Laden’s use of Islam and Bush’s use of Christianity create similar foundations from which each draws his objectification of the other. Importantly, Bhatia concludes that the “battle” between the sides represented by bin Laden and Bush cannot be defused without a deep understanding of the “cultural contexts, political histories, and affiliations” that inform the logic of each side. Expecting one side to “win” this rhetorical battle reveals a limited understanding of the dense structures of meaning that inform each set of arguments.

In highlighting the use of religious discourse as a focal point for her essay, Bhatia makes more complex our understanding about the role of political actors in the Global War on Terrorism. By focusing on religious references in the rhetoric of bin Laden and Bush, she shows how difficult it would be to sever either of these individual political actors from the cultural discourse they employ in their rhetoric. In doing so, Bhatia furthers Jackson’s argument about the “meaninglessness” of bin Laden’s death; the rhetorical dichotomies that underlie the Global War on Terrorism did not disappear with bin Laden (or, for that matter, with the election of Barack Obama). Without a better understanding of the rhetorical structures that underlie discourses on terrorism, the role of political actors and the media cannot be well understood.

In his evocative chapter, “The bin Laden Tapes,” Andrew Hill looks back to the time before Osama bin Laden’s death and then reflects on the period after his death. The exercise reminds us of the intimidation factor bin Laden wielded—through both his media ubiquity and his simultaneous physical elusiveness. Hill examines Bin Laden’s video and audio appearances after the September 11 attacks in order “to scrutinize both the means by which these appearances have allowed bin Laden to continue to intervene in the War on Terror, and the terms in which they have served to shape perceptions in the West of the nature of the enemy faced in this conflict.” Although bin Laden functioned “as a metonym for Al Qaeda and the enemy more broadly in the War on Terror,” his death did not eliminate the threats—real or perceived—posed by Al Qaeda. Indeed, Hill argues that the West can be said to have “exorcised” Osama bin Laden by shifting the narrative from that of hunting for the world’s leading terrorist to that of “Obama got Osama.”

As discussed repeatedly in this volume, most people know bin Laden only through his mediated presence. For years, bin Laden goaded his opponents with threats and accusations through his video appearances. Each release served as a potent reminder of his enemies’ inability to find him despite conducting the most intensive manhunt in history. As Hill describes, “bin Laden’s video appearances acquire an added aura of defiance, demonstrating that despite the measures taken to achieve a sighting of him, he can persist in making himself seen across the globe—apparently if and when he so wishes—without being captured or destroyed.” Hill argues that bin Laden acquired a type of demonic, spectral presence: “the absence of the hard Real of his physical presence allow[ed] him to remain beyond the grasp of his captors.” Until his death, bin Laden existed largely as a malevolent voice and disembodied form; the object whose physical presence—a precondition for his capture or killing—seemed beyond the reach of the world’s most powerful nations. “Locating Bin Laden in these terms serves to illuminate the scale of the fears associated with him, in suggesting he is able to enact a form of total or universal haunting from which it is impossible to escape.” And yet, with his death, escape appears to have come. In terms of the extent to which bin Laden continues to constitute a rallying figure for his followers and future supporters, the evidence is uncertain. When he was alive, bin Laden created a “sense of ontological indeterminacy associated with the ghostly [… that] constituted a key element in the fears and fantasies associated with the threat both he and the enemy more generally [were] conceived as presenting to the West.” The significance of his death then, argues Hill, occurred on two levels. “In addition to a biological death—death in the Real—it is possible to speak of another type of death—death in the Symbolic, the death of a subject’s signifying status, and the capacity of their name and actions to continue to register in the way they had once done.” The Obama administration’s decision to refuse the release of any images of bin Laden’s death (or burial) might be “understood as striving to bring about his second, Symbolic death. […] It is in this attempt to bring about bin Laden’s Symbolic death that Operation Neptune Spear can be said to constitute a type of exorcism.” Indeed, bin Laden himself may have contributed to his own symbolic exorcism due to his lack of visibility and seeming inability to carry out attacks either personally or through Al Qaeda during his final years. Hill points to the last images we have of bin Laden—sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket and watching himself on TV—to underscore the shift in who is haunting whom: “in these video excerpts a monstrous source of evil is revealed as nothing more than a frail, lonely figure, sitting alone in a room.”

Political actors play a fundamental role in defining a figure like Osama bin Laden and his perceived significance on the world stage. But as with the messages of bin Laden himself, most people’s exposure to the perspectives of political actors is indirect; that is to say, it is mediated. This mediation comes through many channels and is continually shaped in the process by issues such as language, context, geography, and media form. The second section of this volume examines the interplay between context and media in representing bin Laden and the Global War on Terrorism, paying particular attention to the news media. News media are a distinctly important link in the process of political communication due to their power as intermediaries between political actors and the rest of society. Their contributions to discourse, both actively and passively, have deep-seated impacts on social perceptions and political decision making.

It may be a modern truism to declare that people experience global events and actors primarily through media. Less obvious, however, are the contradictions and consequences of today’s mediated environment. Media bring the world closer to us, yet their very use illustrates how removed from events we really are. Media inform us and depict what we cannot see for ourselves, yet their representations are, by nature, selective and habitual. Media provide us with unprecedented tools for collective awareness, yet individuals are increasingly overwhelmed by information and entertainment flows. Osama bin Laden was surely “known” to most people only through his media representations, making him a particularly useful case for examining these distinct conditions of our contemporary mediated environment. It is certainly another truism that bin Laden and his network were at the center of a discourse on terrorism that has reshaped geopolitics in the twenty-first century. Examining the media’s role in crafting and circulating this discourse—especially the news media—contributes to a greater understanding of public perceptions and the policies that followed from them after September 11, 2001.

The extraordinary circumstances connected to Osama bin Laden’s life and death bring to the fore issues of geography and intimacy, media production and representation, spectacle and sense making. Chapters in the second section speak to each of these elements within our contemporary mediated environment by examining important relationships between Osama bin Laden—the phenomenon—and the diverse global news media that represented him. For years, bin Laden was simply “out there” in an unknown location, geographically removed from the experiences of ordinary citizens. Though his physical whereabouts remained a mystery for many years, as a globally mediated figure he was always intimately accessible. This was no coincidence. As noted previously, bin Laden himself labored to get maximum exposure by exploiting both the Internet’s growing reach and terrorism’s reciprocal relationship with the news media. He did manage to transcend physical boundaries, but his messages always remained subject to the myriad of contexts through which they cascaded. By applying comparative approaches, each author in this section uses variations in context as analytical devices to explore contrasting representations of bin Laden. Whether comparing Al Jazeera to Al Qaeda, German and British tabloids, bin Laden’s wives in Anglo-American and Arab news coverage, or bin Laden’s death with those of Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi, these four chapters illustrate how specific social, political, cultural, and communicative contexts can impact our perceptions of global actors and the events surrounding them.

In addition to the issues of geography and intimacy, the mechanics of media production and representation are other recurrent themes in this section. Factors such as media routines and news norms shape content in significant ways. In turn, that content shapes social perceptions and attitudes. As discussed in the previous section, political actors on all sides operated from the premise of media’s capacity to shape social perceptions and often exploited these conditions in an effort to influence media representations for their own political advantage. During the Global War on Terrorism, battlefronts were fought with tenacity both on the ground and through the media. News media professionals, of course, are not simply slaves to routine and manipulation. They are also actors in their own right, serving as a kind of distillation point for social discourse. News and information flow through them and are actively shaped in the process. In the wake of 9/11, for example, Hellmich describes how “virtually overnight, journalists became the most influential commentators in the field … because their words and their analyses of the situation reached many people first.”⁴⁵ Even after distillation, the amount of information and “news” about bin Laden and his associates became simply overwhelming in volume. This was largely driven by the public’s heightened interest in him. Regardless of one’s affiliations, for years there existed a global audience for information about bin Laden’s activities and whereabouts. His case is therefore instructive for what it says about the ways in which political actors, news media, and society interact under exceptional circumstances.

Despite the extraordinary circumstances that produced bin Laden himself as an object of media, however, a study of bin Laden and global news media may actually reify more normative principles than exceptions. Across time, space, format, and focus of inquiry, many embedded principles of media operation and attraction reveal themselves in these four chapters. The authors demonstrate such phenomena as the news media’s tendency to echo Manichean political narratives, and they exhibit how intimacy, horror, and voyeurism underpin terrorism’s mediation. The use of social categorizations (in-groups and out-groups), narratives, framing devices, and the penchant for spectacle are familiar themes in all the examined media—in addition to the persistent issues of context, media production, and representation previously discussed. It is especially telling that such similarities arise considering the significant differences between the four essays in this section. As a collective, the authors examine language and imagery, primary and secondary political actors, and different times and locations. They cover a broad spectrum of media formats, including tabloids and broadsheets, print and broadcast journalism, as well as text, images, and video. They also look at news products in different countries and languages. Even bin Laden himself is not always the central focus: Al Jazeera, Al Qaeda, bin Laden’s wives, Saddam Hussain, and Muammar el-Qaddafi feature prominently in the respective essays. Ultimately, this breadth speaks to the vast configuration of signs and symbols associated with bin Laden, which the authors skillfully reassemble in different contexts to show important relationships between social discourses and the sense-making process.

In her chapter, “Words and War: Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda,” Courtney C. Radsch explores globalization, resistance, and identity as forces shaping the relationship between Osama bin Laden and the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network. As powerful alternatives to the American status quo, the two networks are bound up in each other. Like many of the other authors in this volume, Radsch describes a dominant friend/enemy paradigm in the years following 9/11 that pitted Al Qaeda’s terrorists against America and the West: It reflected an ideological dichotomy of fundamentalism versus neoliberalism, which replaced the Cold War’s communism-versus-liberalism paradigm as the central grand narrative. Actors on both “sides” encouraged this black-and-white narrative, and Al Jazeera both suffered and benefited from this condition. Self-branded as an alternative to Western news hegemony and offering exclusive access to people and places close to America’s conflicts, it was not long before many people inexorably linked Al Jazeera with Al Qaeda. Radsch notes that, although damaging in some contexts, the controversies surrounding Al Jazeera’s relationship to Al Qaeda simultaneously contributed to the station’s meteoric rise.

Through the paradigm of this bipolar world order, one’s enemies seemingly come into clear focus. On one side, bin Laden and his supporters effectively portrayed the United States and its allies as the purveyors of discontent. Conversely, after the attacks of 9/11, George W. Bush and his allies “used the concept of the enemy to create social solidarity and reconstruct collective conscience to allow [the United States] to invade Iraq and restrict civil liberties.” In short, Radsch contends, “radical Islamists and neoliberals served each other’s political needs since each group was strengthened and identified in opposition to its ideological Other.” Like much of the global news media, Al Jazeera amplified these dichotomous characterizations through their coverage. Unlike their American counterparts, however, Al Jazeera portrayed these conflicts more in line with Arab public opinion, tying them closely with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. military presence in the Arabian Peninsula. Al Jazeera’s representations were distinct manifestations of its particular geography and context. In turn, this influenced how people around the world made sense of the station and its content. Given the prevalence of Manichean thinking at the time, it seems almost inevitable that Al Jazeera’s practices—indeed its very existence—situated it clearly in the counter-hegemonic camp by people on all sides of the conflict.

Ultimately, Radsch argues that psychological factors can prove more significant than numerical or physical superiority in such ideological conflicts. It is here that both Osama bin Laden and Al Jazeera may have had their biggest impact on the world stage. By simply questioning U.S. moral leadership and its role as the sole superpower, they have added fissures to the perceived authority of the United States. She argues that if hegemony derives power from operating on an unquestioned basis, then foregrounding such fissures can contribute to a decline in U.S. hegemonic power. “The use of force, in Iraq and elsewhere, undermined consent and the legitimacy of values, norms, and other such intangibles. Al Qaeda brought this contestation to the forefront while Al Jazeera ensured the world was aware of these challenges.” Even with the death of bin Laden, efforts to present an ideological alternative to U.S. hegemony continue. “Although it will take a lot more to destroy America than a few attacks,” concludes Radsch, “the U.S. and Western response to Al Qaeda’s terrorism and Al Jazeera’s coverage may be what ultimately undoes American hegemony by weakening America’s moral authority and consent to its normative ideals.” Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s legacy as either a villain or a hero is still being negotiated on the airwaves and in the presses. To see this battle in action, one needs only to look at the recent controversy surrounding Al Jazeera’s 2013 purchase of Al Gore’s cable station, Current TV. Dichotomous characterizations, heightened emotions, and political opportunism are familiar themes as the station tries to enter the U.S. media market more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks.

Alexander Spencer’s chapter, “Metaphorizing Terrorism: Al Qaeda in German and British Tabloids,” also deals with ideology and hegemony, though he moves the discussion from issues of geopolitics and media production to the power of words. He declares that “until fairly recently there has been little interest in the perception of terrorism and role of language and discourse in the construction of ‘the terrorist.’” Specifically, he focuses on metaphors as mechanisms that project “understandings from one conceptual area, such as war, to a different area, such as terrorism, [… thus naturalizing] specific countermeasures while placing other options outside of the mainstream debate.” In doing so, he argues that the influence of metaphors extends into both the realm of public perception and policymaking.

Spencer illustrates this by examining metaphors about bin Laden that dominated in German and British tabloids following four large Al Qaeda attacks: September 11, 2001; the 2002 bombings in Bali; the 2004 train bombings in Madrid; and the 2005 London Underground attacks. He identifies four particular “metaphorization[s] of terrorism” that cross both time periods and borders: Terrorism is war; Terrorism is crime; Terrorism is uncivilized evil; and Terrorism is a disease. Each suggests a particular frame for interpreting these terrorist acts, which in turn works to confine the locus of discussion and its ensuing policy responses. For example, Spencer reminds us that constituting terrorism as “war” calls for a military response, as was conducted against Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere under the grand metaphor of the War on Terror. His second conceptual metaphor, that terrorism is “crime,” helped naturalize certain judicial responses. Certainly, news media frequently framed controversial changes in domestic policies and the debates over international terrorism laws through such a metaphor. Third, Spencer claims that the metaphor of terrorism as “uncivilized evil” provided a psychological basis for “concrete and clear polarization, as it outcasts the actor and his or her actions and dichotomizes and antagonizes them (the out-group) and us (the in-group).” He contends that this social categorization “increasingly constructs the terrorist as something ‘other’ and generally alien and foreign, which then makes counterterrorism measures—such as tighter border and immigration controls—possible and appropriate in order to keep such elements out.” Finally, as with the metaphor of “evil,” that of “disease” confers terrorists as people beyond reason. The implication is that nonmilitary options for response or prevention are ultimately fruitless.

Spencer cautions that “there is no one-to-one relationship between reality and metaphors, as we cannot observe physical events directly but do so in a particular interpretative context and through discourse.” That is—reinforcing one of the key themes of this volume—experiences of empirical events shape discourse, and discourse shapes experiences. This mutually constitutive relationship compels us to consider the role of language in our understanding of a subject with terrorism’s gravity. Spencer examines both the mediated specter of bin Laden as the central protagonist representing Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda as the archetypical terrorist organization. Spencer’s chapter provides insights into some of the linguistic mechanisms by which tabloid media told this global drama in two different Western contexts, thus illuminating some of the important discursive backdrop to bin Laden’s story. Spencer’s analysis reminds us again how issues of geography, representation, and sense making come together within our contemporary mediated environment to shape how audiences “know” a figure like bin Laden.

In the third essay of this section, “The Myth of the Terrorist as a Lover: Competing Regional Media Frames,” Noha Mellor examines media coverage of Osama bin Laden in Anglo-American and Arab news sources. Like the other contributions in this section, Mellor’s international scope illustrates geographical variations, the content she examines underscores issues of representation, and her analysis explores the process by which meanings about bin Laden are constructed. Mellor’s particular angle is in her attention to intimacy and spectacle. Mellor focuses exclusively on coverage about bin Laden’s relationships with his wives. She describes how bin Laden’s sexuality and personal relationships—often no more than speculation—were used in Anglo-American contexts to further demonize him as barbaric and primal. Of course, sex also sells: “Indeed, the focus on sex and sexuality is one strategy of the tabloid journalists to attract readers’ attention.” However, Arab media appears to have covered bin Laden’s partners in quite a different light. Arab journalists focused more often on the societal circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s family and depicted his wives’ loyalty as acts motivated by their faith, rather than by sexuality or blind obedience.

Mellor discusses common practices in the news-making process that underlie the circulation and interpretation of these stories among different communities. “Because news communicates through narrative, it rests on the construction and dissemination of known cultural myths, understood not as false tales but as narratives that are grounded in specific cultural values and ideologies. Such narratives then reflect a certain (cultural) view of the world, and it inevitably includes archetypes such as heroes, villains, and victims.” Journalists utilize these conventional storylines to reduce the complexity of news into short vignettes. The continual retelling of cultural myths in such a way thus naturalizes certain interpretations of events, facts, and characters to make them appear commonsensical. The power of myth in the news is particularly note-worthy because it rests on journalistic claims of objectivity and factuality, even when drawn from predefined narratives. The circulation of myths through the news may be a common factor of production in any environment. However, the content of the myths themselves is highly contextual. Mellor’s analysis of the myths embedded in news coverage of bin Laden’s wives is provocative for the questions it raises about the disparate ways of “knowing” between world regions and communities.

Bin Laden’s wives are perhaps supporting characters in a larger story, but they did receive notable coverage in both Arab and Anglo-American media—especially his last wife, Amal Assadah. What is most telling, however, is not the quantity of coverage about these women, but rather the qualitative differences between their representations in Arabic and English media. Arab news used humanitarian narratives, telling such stories as the tragedy of “mothers and widows detained in a foreign country and in need of help from the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, to facilitate their release and their return to Saudi Arabia.” By contrast, Mellor shows that Anglo-American media chose to focus on bin Laden’s wives as mostly objects at the control of a sexual being. Such depictions contributed to—and also reflected—the broader myth of bin Laden as “neurotic evil.” Media fascination with the Al Qaeda’s women is likely to continue for years to come. Mellor’s attention to bin Laden’s wives gives us some indication of how this attention will be shaped by media in different regions of the globe.

The final chapter in this section addresses the significance of visual communication. What we “know” and how we know are not just functions of words and language; they are also influenced profoundly by imagery. In their piece, “Images of our Dead Enemies: Visual Representations of bin Laden, Hussein, and el-Qaddafi,” Susan Moeller, Joanna Nurmis, and Saranaz Barforoush provide a comparative analysis of visual representations surrounding the killing of today’s most infamous tyrants. The variation in their analysis is not so much one of geography, but rather of person. The subject of death and the manner of its visual portrayal (or lack thereof) accentuate the issue of intimacy over proximity. Here again, media norms and social context dictate the representation of events. Minutes after President Obama’s announcement of bin Laden’s killing, “news outlets across the world scrambled to cover the story of the decade. With no immediately forthcoming photos of bin Laden’s corpse … [they] had a set of decisions to make about what kind of image to select to accompany the announcement.” This chapter examines how those choices helped frame bin Laden’s death for a watching world and directed the public to a particular understanding of it.

Today, journalists are increasingly framing news using digital information and visuals that come from nontraditional sources. Moeller and her colleagues describe how these tangled connections blur “the lines between ‘mainstream’ journalism and ‘citizen’ journalism, between breaking news that is first reported by professional journalists, and ‘news’ that is published via YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook by people who happen to be ‘on location.’” In today’s fast-paced, digitalized news environment the public expect immediate access to uncensored information—though with instances of death and destruction, news media must still negotiate a careful balance between explicit portrayals and public sensitivities. Where they draw the line, Moeller and her coauthors point out, depends significantly on who the dead are. “When someone has died who is believed to be guilty of violent aggression, war crimes, or crimes against humanity, all too often a blood lust rises among those who consider themselves to be victims, even victims by proxy. Audiences want to see the formerly all-powerful persecutor ‘taken down.’” Osama bin Laden is an instructive example of such a situation where digital convergence, expedience, and blood lust intersected on a grand scale. Without official visual evidence of his death, however, the media were compelled to draw upon other sources in framing the story. In evaluating the choices they made at that time, this chapter argues that it is instructive to consider the deaths of Saddam Hussein in 2006 and Muammar el-Qaddafi five years later. The histories of these three men as “enemies of the West,” and the literal circumstances of their capture and deaths, provide instructive cases about the powers of visual representation. In each situation, citizens—as audiences and occasionally “news sources”—had profound impacts on how the news media framed these stories.

Moeller and her colleagues situate their analysis within broader conceptual debates about the very nature of evidence and the perennial question of whether seeing (in person or virtually) is believing. The authors ask, “if the fact of a death really matters—politically, militarily, even emotionally—is it enough to take someone else’s word for it, to just simply hear (or read) a narrative account of that death?” Indeed, a photograph appears to provide relatively neutral “evidence” when portraying a death. Video footage can have similar believability, especially when shot on scene. Both place the viewer intimately within, but at a safe distance from, the events they appear to represent. Nevertheless, viewers are simultaneously aware these representations are only simulacra for direct visual knowledge. Using the cases of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar el-Qaddafi, the authors address such deep-seated contradictions of our mediated environment and remind us again that “framing is one of the most inevitable, yet at the same time most complex, of all media actions.”

News media, however, do not comprise the totality of media forms. Expressions of popular culture also provide significant reflections of social experience as manifested through various media outlets, like films, posters, bumper stickers, and video games. Where the news media boast objectivity, popular culture exudes subjectivity. This window into popular expression is the subject of the final section in this volume.

Osama bin Laden was not a movie star, a pop singer, or a television celebrity. Why, then, focus critical attention on bin Laden and popular cultures? “Terrorism,” as Susan Moeller says, “is about getting the public’s attention.”⁴⁶ A popular culture analysis of Osama bin Laden and terrorism reminds us that there are multiple ways in which to get and sustain “attention” and that “attention” itself takes multiple expressive forms. While Osama bin Laden is responsible for orchestrating the most effective attention-getting act of terrorism in history in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the televised images of the attacks are not the only ways in which messages about terrorism—and specifically characterizations of the figure held responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden—were disseminated in global cultures. In addition to news media, posters, blogs, cartoons, speeches, film, video games, and word-of-mouth all contributed to how people learned of events surrounding Osama bin Laden—and, indeed, about bin Laden himself. The essays in this section affirm Maura Conway’s point that, while “it is through media consumption that a majority of individuals learn about terrorism … it is not through ‘news media’ alone that this learning takes place.”⁴⁷

More importantly, while audiences learn information about Osama bin Laden, terrorism, the “Ummah,” or the World Trade Center attacks through more than news media, audiences process what they see and learn through the popular narratives that provide sense and meaning to events that otherwise may seem disjunctive, overwhelming, or fearful. Renata Salecl explains that “When people feel uncertain and afraid they are in search of clear images of their enemies.”⁴⁸ Both the “beatific” images of bin Laden that appeared on T-shirts “throughout the Muslim world” and the poster of bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building that appeared in New York a few days after 9/11 provide popular meaning for audiences by signaling sense-making narratives: bin Laden as the “religious Robin Hood” who brought justice to those who suffered from American military actions or bin Laden as the object of violent, sexualized retribution for the 9/11 attacks (“The Empire Strikes Back … So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?”⁴⁹).

What Andreas Behnke and Benjamin de Carvalho argue about international relations scholarship—that it “is not about whether popular culture is relevant … but about how it is relevant”⁵⁰—stands as the theme for this third section: that it is not a question of whether popular culture should be considered in an examination of bin Laden and global media, but instead a question of how popular culture across the globe is used as a mechanism for disseminating, comprehending, and making sense of the globally recognized persona, “Osama bin Laden.”

Television, magazines, newspapers, films, posters, T-shirts, cartoons, websites, blogs, comic books, video games, signs, caricatures—around the world, images of Osama bin Laden were disseminated widely across media formats. Indeed, bin Laden’s image was so widely propagated that his image itself became less a representation of a person than a cultural object in its own right, carrying less value as a depiction of a person than as an icon with broad and varying symbolic value. Whether as a “terrorist” or a “hero,” as an object of hatred or reverence, “Osama bin Laden” as a cultural image carried broad meanings that varied across audiences and publics the world over. These signifiers captured many of the emotional tenors that surrounded the cultural object of bin Laden: anger, reverence, fear, hero worship, revenge, to name a few. Most importantly, popular culture images intersected with news discourse and political rhetoric to provide underlying sense-making narratives.

Within today’s global media context, Osama bin Laden has been one of media’s most recognized figures. In the ten weeks after 9/11, for example, bin Laden’s image appeared in the United States on the covers of Time and Newsweek five times, more than President Bush.⁵¹ A Google search in 2014 of the name “bin Laden” turns up 150,000,000 references, with an additional 116,000,000 images, indicating the degree to which Osama bin Laden’s name has become a part of global media culture. He was called “the most hunted and arguably hated person this century” with “one of the most famous faces in the world.”⁵²

The cultural icon “Osama bin Laden” was propagated in other forms as well. Australian artist Priscilla Bracks sparked controversy by using popular morphing imagery to merge bin Laden’s image into that of Jesus Christ, while other morphing games allowed players to change bin Laden’s image themselves.⁵³ In the United States, bin Laden was the object of jokes by comedians and humorists. Late-night talk show host and comedian David Letterman offered one of his standard “top ten reasons” jokes about bin Laden: “Top Ten Ways bin Laden can improve his image. 10. There’s no way he can improve his image. He’s a murdering, soul-less asshole.”⁵⁴ (The remaining nine items on the list are blank.) Entire web pages are devoted to jokes about bin Laden. Others are devoted to cartoons.⁵⁵ One internet list even includes anagrams of bin Laden’s name (“do a samba, Lenin”).⁵⁶

Through video games, audiences were invited to join in the hunt for bin Laden. In “Kill Osama bin Laden,” players are instructed to “snipe terrorists and take out Osama bin Laden. Once dead, cut off his head for proof to the government.”⁵⁷ What Ian Bogost has called “tabloid games” also feature bin Laden. “Ogama Ben Ladder,” for example, has players control a falling bin Laden, trying to avoid dangerous objects or, as one reviewer put it, “hit them. The rag doll Bin Laden likeness bruises, loses limbs and bleeds as he hits objects during the fall, until he finally succumbs to his injuries.”⁵⁸ With even more graphic opportunities to harm bin Laden, games such as “Osamagotchi” offer players the chance to “do with him what you want, even throw missils [sic] and knifes [sic], very original.”⁵⁹ The magazine Political Humor lists some of the “humorous” games that enable players to box with bin Laden (“put him down for the count”), “fire missiles and splatter bin Laden all over the desert” (“Bend Over bin Laden”), or to take him as a prisoner and ponder “how will you treat him” (Alquaidomon).⁶⁰

Bin Laden’s dead body—real or imagined—is so frequently referenced that it constitutes a category of its own, with over three million images available on the Web. In perhaps the ultimate confirmation of its allure, bin Laden’s dead body was used as bait for a computer scam, with an email message inviting recipients to view bin Laden’s captured or hanged body as a lure to download a computer virus.⁶¹ In the days immediately after bin Laden’s death, hackers took advantage of the attention the story was getting to develop multiple internet scams. “This is one of those rare opportunities that can build you a great list and a couple of zeros in your profit,” an anonymous hacker crowed. “Use it while the news of Bin Laden killed by US forces is hot. I just started one and it had 600 likes in 2 minutes.”⁶²

In her analysis of “Osamakitsch,” Tracey J. Potts argues that, in dealing with cultural objects, one has to be “mindful of the specific manner of their production and consumption.”⁶³ To that end, the essays in this section begin the project specification of how “Osama bin Laden” has been produced as a cultural object and for what purposes. We begin with an examination of video games before moving into cinema and then popular culture writ large. The section ends with an exploration of grand narratives about bin Laden, terrorism, and Islam as expressed through U.S. popular culture to highlight some of the broad social implications of such totalizing expressions.

In “Congratulations! You Have Killed Osama bin Laden!!” Simon Ferrari posits that the fact that the field of video games—as both a product and an object of critique—has not yet been codified makes it an appropriate location for studying the political and cultural narratives surrounding bin Laden and the Global War on Terrorism, since these too are areas in which critique and, indeed, product has yet to be solidified. An examination of bin Laden video games provides a glimpse at short-term cultural “sense-making.” While cultural products such as film, television, or written narrative take time to process and produce, the video games that Ferrari highlights are—often with low quality and without industry support—a short-term response to cultural events. In his essay for this volume, Ferrari looks particularly at a segment that he calls “newsgames,” those video games that perform “one of the functions or goals of journalistic endeavor.”

Ferrari introduces readers to the gamut of newsgames about bin Laden. The first game, entitled “Bad Dudes vs Bin Laden,” was produced just three days after 9/11. The action of the game is straightforward: bin Laden is tracked by a Secret Service agent to a “Middle Eastern marketplace” where the player can deliver a series of punches and kicks to the bin Laden figure, culminating in a “Finish Him” kick that removes bin Laden’s head. In the years following 9/11, games continued to feature such retributive attacks on bin Laden’s person, adding elements of torture that, as Ferrari points out, prefigure some of the images later seen from Abu Ghraib. The production of bin Laden newsgames resurged after the news of his death, shifting to more documentary games that place players in the compound in Abbottabad. Continuing to emphasize the rapidity of response to events, Ferrari points to the version of the popular “Counter-Strike” series that adds a segment, “Fight Yard Abbottabad,” in which multiplayer teams fight “terrorists” in a simulated likeness of the compound in which bin Laden had been living for six years.

In addition to providing an opportunity to understand a newer form of global media, Ferrari’s essay foregrounds an aspect of global media that is mentioned in other essays in this volume—the creation of “news” by those who are not journalists. Importantly, Ferrari points out that these contributions often enable expressions that are deemed inappropriate for mainstream media, such as the blood and gore of the violent games that target the “real” figure, Osama bin Laden. In the end, Ferrari points out, such newsgames “are about how he made us feel, about us rather than him.”

Returning to the issue of bin Laden’s “ghost” as discussed separately by both Jackson and Hill in part I of this volume, Purnima Bose’s chapter, “Without Osama: Tere Bin Laden and the Critique of the War on Terror,” analyzes an Indian independent film, Tere Bin Laden, in which bin Laden never actually appears but in which his image, speeches, and actions impact all of the film’s main characters.⁶⁴ The film is a critique of global media, the Global War on Terrorism, the U.S. security state, and the aspiring middle class in Pakistan, and its plot revolves around a series of fake bin Laden tapes manufactured by an Indian journalist who has been mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list and who hopes that the profit from selling the videos will enable him to purchase a falsified passport that will gain him entry to the United States. Bose’s trenchant analysis reveals the ways in which the icon, “Osama bin Laden,” has both literal and cultural currency across the globe. As she explains, “In the mediated landscape of the twenty-first century, Osama bin Laden exists as a handy empty signifier that multiple agents can manipulate for different kinds of economic, professional, and geographic mobility.” Bose’s essay reminds us that conversations about global media are about more than media formats, representational choices, and narrative styles but instead are deeply intertwined with global economic flows, national power, and geographies of both individual and regional positioning.

Most pointedly, Bose shows how individuals across the globe use global media to profit from bin Laden, even (and perhaps especially) a fake bin Laden. Whether the Pakistani journalist who ends up emigrating to the United States, the man who faked bin Laden’s voice who ended up founding the Communist Party of Pakistan, or the U.S. director of Intelligence who participates in the final fake bin Laden tape rather than admit he was fooled by it and is subsequently promoted to secretary of defense—all achieve successful careers for themselves as a direct result of their participation in the manufacturing of “bin Laden” as a media product. Through her critique of this satirical film, Bose reminds us that the global media version of “bin Laden” has become an industry in its own right, whether in the United States, Pakistan, India, or elsewhere around the world.

In “Obama bin Laden [sic]: How to Win the War on Terror #likeaboss” Ryan Croken speaks directly to the sense-making role of popular culture in his analysis of the cultural “confusion” that existed in the United States between Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. Croken uses the cultural slippages (Obama/Osama), conspiratorial elisions (Obama is Osama), and religious assumptions (Obama, like Osama, is Muslim) that surround Osama and Obama as points for analyzing racialized dynamics that underlie narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, military power, and global dominance. Croken’s essay points us to some of the myriad streams through which popular culture effects its messages: T-shirts, web tools (photo morphing), memes, hip-hop, tweets, YouTube videos, and the like. Attending to these media formats is an essential component of examining sense-making across the complexities of U.S. cultures. In contrast to the mainstream media, which is more unidirectional in its distribution, the popular media formats examined by Croken are most often user-generated. In using what he calls “digital minstrelsy ventriloquism,” for example, Croken shows how users create new meanings from existing videos (for example, of Obama’s walk to the podium to make the announcement about bin Laden’s death) by editing the videos and adding sound tracks from existing songs (“Like a Boss”).

Importantly, Croken uses this focus on the negotiations and creations of meaning in popular narratives to argue that the “confusion” between Osama and Obama is more than just difficulty with name pronunciation, lack of familiarity with Islam, or merging of nonwhite skin color, but is instead a complex negotiation of racial intersections with national narratives. The interplay in U.S. cultural meanings between nonwhite African Americans and nonwhite Arabs positions African Americans to be aligned with U.S. national goals in opposition to the Muslim Other, a narrative in which Obama can redeem his own “Americanness” and put to rest questions about his own national belonging by killing his “brother,” Osama bin Laden.

Brigitte L. Nacos reminds us in her essay, “Muslims in America and the Post-9/11 Terrorism Debates: Media and Public Opinion,” that there are intimate intersections between popular culture, mainstream media, and political actions. In her discussion of representations in U.S. media of bin Laden, terrorists, and Muslims, she focuses on the “post-9/11 ‘us’ versus ‘them’” narrative structures that enable the positioning of Muslims as the enemy. She argues persuasively that depictions of Muslims as enemies were not only a commonly shared trope across mainstream media and popular culture, but that these depictions themselves shaped the attitudes toward and practices of torture of presumed Muslim terrorists by the U.S. military. As Nacos concludes, “How we view the world around us, how we think and talk about issues and problems … is not only affected by the information we receive as news but also by the words, ideas, images, and stereotypes presented in different types of mass media.” By looking at one of the most famous examples of “Hollywood terror fiction”—the television program 24—Nacos is able to show the overlaps between popular narratives, mainstream media, and political discourses. With politicians, judges, and newscasters all using the program’s star, Jack Bauer, as an example of what to do to stop future terrorist attacks, it is clear that the boundaries between forms of media are permeable and cross-pollinating.

Nacos returns us to questions about the epistemological structures of media’s engagement with terrorism by reminding us that what the media chooses not to say is just as important as what it does. Focusing on media’s ability to both “communicate” and “excommunicate,” Nacos analyzes the ways in which portrayals of Muslims changed after 9/11 and the decade following. By choosing not to “communicate” information about Muslims who opposed bin Laden and terrorism, U.S. media effectively enabled negative representations of Muslims to dominate the mediascape. Importantly, Nacos argues that such omissions are not merely oversights or mistakes on the part of a busy media but instead are framing moments for cultural understanding and action. Nacos links media’s negative portrayals of Muslims to subsequent actions in the Global War on Terrorism. In particular, she points to acts of torture such as those at Abu Ghraib as implementations of the “excommunication” epistemologies employed in media.

The essays gathered in this volume contribute to our understanding of global media in multiple ways. By taking a common focal point for their discussions—Osama bin Laden—the authors give us an opportunity to compare media perspectives across national and regional boundaries, across media formats, and across methodologies, theories, and disciplinary practices. In so doing, they provide a case study on contemporary media analytical methods. In addition, by writing about perspectives both in and outside the West, the authors provide insight into the complex terrain that is global media, an arena in which the same “object” has multiple and frequently conflicting meanings, depending upon the frameworks within which audiences interpret media products. Simultaneously, the essays in this volume remind us that there is no stable “object” of global media. Osama bin Laden—enemy, hero, fiend, visionary, egotist, mastermind, husband, father, murderer, savior—is variously a certainty—“we know who he is” (a necessary precondition in order to hunt and kill him)—and he remains a ghost who haunts the discourses of the Global War on Terrorism.

In addition to serving as a focal point for understanding the operations of global media, bin Laden is an important figure of analysis because he is a key participant in the global tensions around the nation-state, with global media transecting these debates. Bin Laden was himself an advocate of the dissolution of states and replacing them with the Ummah, the nonstate-based Muslim community around the world. He was also the symbolic leader of a movement that took on the most powerful state in the world—the United States—and revealed its vulnerabilities. Simultaneously, the global media that he used to communicate with the world and that made him a globally recognized figure is itself becoming decreasingly state-based, with the rise of multinational media conglomerates and media outlets such as Al Jazeera that are designed to serve cross-national populations. As Rohit Chopra explains, “the category of the national itself has been profoundly altered in a global world, and media both contribute to and reflect this change.”⁶⁵

The authors in this volume collectively encourage an engagement with the media that would 1) seek comparative readings of the news from other media outlets, whether in other national contexts or other media formats; 2) look not only at what media says, but also at what it does not say—what voices are being left out, what information is being excluded, and what stories are not being told; and 3) understand how media both uses and is used by individuals and groups, whether they be political actors, nations, individual and corporate profit seekers, or nonnational movements. Global media have changed dramatically since Osama bin Laden became a world figure. By studying how he used media and how media used him, we can gain a greater understanding of global media “after bin Laden.”