Five days into the biggest court case in Norwegian history and there are signs that Breivik fatigue is setting in. Many of the biggest local newspapers chose to run different stories on their front pages on Friday, with one weekly, Morgenbladet, running a cover featuring a picture of Breivik with his face obscured and replaced with the words "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!"

Though many are tiring of the blanket media coverage, the wounds from 22 July are still raw. Laying a single rose outside the court on Friday, Halina Burger, an aromatherapist, said the massacre was a shock from which Norway had yet to recover. "It was an attack on all of us," she said. "An attack on our dignity, our freedom, an attack on everything that is beautiful in this country; the tolerance we have been striving for for so long."

She hadn't been following the blow-by-blow reports, she said. "If I followed it minute-by-minute I would be so filled with anger and hatred and disgust, I might just come down here and throw stones at the guy instead and I don't want to do that."

Asgeir, a 32-year-old who said he didn't want to be named for fear of attracting attention from Breivik's "partisans", said: "The media are too obsessed with details, and too little concerned with the broad picture. I'm really unsure if the right thing to do is to expose the terrorist's misconceptions, or to just ignore him."

Silje Gloppen, a teacher, said however abhorrent Breivik's views, lessons needed to be learned from him. "Norwegians and, I believe, the rest of the world have to consider the possibility that this man is speaking the truth when he says he believes our 'Norwegian culture and ethnicity' is threatened by multiculturalism," she said.

Breivik's outlook is shared by "too many", she argued, citing the comment fields under articles on Norwegian newspaper websites, and a battle on Wikipedia pages related to the case between moderators and extremist writers trying to take hold of "the truth" on the internet.

"I am afraid the left side in politics have for too long failed to grasp that there are challenges with the new society that need to be discussed," she added.