of the information they wish to convey, but for the actual, original message as they constructed, designed, and staged it. There is as wide a difference as can be imagined in seeing or hearing the words, "today the kidnappers released a video in which the victim can clearly be seen and heard begging for his life," coming from a reporter who is attempting to accurately distill, describe, and explain what is on a tape, and actually seeing some poor man or woman doing just that. And there is little question that it benefits the terrorist or insurgent group more to have the public view the emotional spectacle than to merely read or hear about it second hand.
To be sure, there seems little question that these videos are newsworthy material, and that there is a basis for the choice the news networks made, early on, to air at least a few seconds of them. That does not mean, however, that the choice to do so was an inevitable or self-evident one, or that it was the choice that best served their viewers or that other considerations should not have outweighed whatever led them to use cuts from these videos. Certainly choices regarding how much to use from some of these videos were hotly debated, both before and after they were aired.
This was seen most dramatically when the tape of Nicholas Berg's beheading was released. The beheading videos, of which there were a number, are themselves part of a sub-set of hostage videos in which the hostage is executed on camera (and as the beheadings-for-camera seemed to taper off, perhaps for fear that the raw savagery displayed was hurting the very movement producing them,[1] other forms of executions began to take their place). The Berg video was the first, and as discussed above, what gave the American media such pause in that case was the systemic taboo within American newsrooms over showing the human body
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- ↑ Osama bin Laden's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote Zarqawi a letter in which he suggested the beheadings were hurting the cause. He suggested hostages be shot instead. See Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Kyle Dabruzzi, "The Next Generation of Jihad," The Weekly Standard, June 28, 2007, weeklystandard.com, available from weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/805fbvze.asp.
