he himself wielded the knife.)
No legitimate news organization was about to air the snuff film, but that did not mean news outlets were not facing agonizing choices. The decision to not air the entire video did not mean that it was not either necessary or appropriate to air some images from the video. Which images, then, should be aired? Networks confronted the additional choice of whether to air those images as moving images, as footage, or as stills "frame grabbed" from the video, while print outlets had to decide how prominently to display whichever images they chose to use. Often whether images are used on the front page or not does not reflect a newspaper's assessment of how important the story the image is associated with it is, but their assessment of how graphic the particular image is. The belief is that those who produce the paper have no way of knowing who will pick the paper up in the morning, and an understanding that many read it at the breakfast table. Putting a particularly graphic image on the front page would therefore mean confronting their readers—and perhaps their reader's young children—with it without providing fair warning. They will tend, therefore, to put such images on the inside of the paper, "teasing" such an image, if it reflects an important story, on the front page. (That is what happened, for example, with the Mogadishu images in most cases.) Today, of course, both print and broadcast outlets face the additional question: Should they provide on their websites hyperlinks to websites that do provide such a video in its entirety for their audience to permit them to view it if they so desire?
It is when hostage videos are released by kidnappers that it can become most transparent that the media are serving as a direct conduit for the terrorist or insurgent message—not, that is, for the substance
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