By: E&P staff Newspaper and TV outlets reacted with virtual unanimity in the past 24 hours in choosing to show strong images of a U.S. citizen in Iraq about to be beheaded by terrorists, but refraining from showing the actual act.
Many papers, including The New York Times, featured on their front page a photo of Nicholas Berg in an orange jumpsuit with five masked Islamic militants standing behind just moments before his death. USA Today showed the killer brandishing the knife on page 2A. Network and cable television showed the early moments of the video that appeared on a radical Islamic web site.
While ABC and NBC halted the tape just as the killer drew his knife, The CBS Evening News showed the murderer slam Berg to the ground and put the knife to his neck. "I just think you really need to let people see as much as they can in a judicious way," CBS Evening News producer Jim Murphy told USA Today. "By showing even that little bit, you got a better sense of what some very bad people are willing to do to Americans."
Fox News showed the killer brandishing the knife, but MSNBC and CNN stopped short.
Bob Keane, a managing editor at Newsday in Melville, N.Y., told the Associated Press that his newspaper would not show images of the actual beheading.
"The story is gruesome enough," Keane said. "We'll leave much of it to people's imaginations. If people are curious, they can go to the Web site."
Associated Press Television News, which provides news pictures to 500 subscribers worldwide, distributed video of the full beheading. The video was preceded by a printed warning that lasted a full minute: "Warning! Man is beheaded on camera, extremely graphic footage."
Seattle Times Executive Editor Michael Fancher told USA Today there was no need to show the beheading -- the menacing photo was enough: "That image shows the calculation behind their act without going farther than we need to tell the reader what happened."
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