Another piece of evidence of the American media's fascination, if not obsession, with bin Laden was his presence on the cover of Time magazine three times and on the cover of Newsweek twice in the ten weeks following the terrorism of September 11. I think we would be hard-pressed to find a precedent of another person on the cover of a major American news magazine three times within a ten-week period.

	A week after President Bush appeared on the cover of Time in the context of Ground Zero, Time ran a cover dominated by a closeup up the face of Osama bin Laden.

Admittedly, Time magazine put President Bush on its cover twice in the same period. Unlike bin Laden, who was alone on each cover with the image focused on his face, Bush on the first cover was shown with others, rescue workers, at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center disaster. On the second Time cover, President Bush was pictured alone. In those ten weeks, Newsweek never once featured the president on its cover. There is no doubt that the media overcovered bin Laden, paying too much attention to the man they referred to as America's "enemy number one."

Bin Laden was not unknown to the American public before the attacks on New York and Washington. However, I think that the speed of his ascent to the position of number-one newsmaker was unprecedented. In the past, we have had major terrorist figures whom the media made into household names—for example, the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s, Muammar al-Qaddafi in the 1980s, and Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s. (Although Hussein was not primarily associated with terrorism during the Persian Gulf War, he had held foreigners hostage and threatened to use them as human shields before the hostilities had started. He also had one of the terrorists he sponsored threaten the United States and the West with violence in case of an attack on Iraq.) But I think we have reached a completely new level of coverage and recognition with bin Laden.