From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Last Sunday, CNN began showing some of the Al-Qaeda tapes.

It had recently acquired from an unnamed source.

They show terrorists making do-it-yourself TNT bombs,

offering instruction in ambushing and kidnapping, and testing poison gas on a dog.

By Monday, ABC and NBC were running CNN's footage, and CBS was running some tapes it itself had purchased.

Al-Qaeda video, once discouraged on TV news by the Bush administration was suddenly screened around the clock.

It's horrible stuff. Horrible. CNN news anchor Aaron Brown said that himself, after presenting a long

and thoughtful explanation for the decision to run the videos at all. Brown said, could we have

edited the tapes differently? Yes, absolutely. They would have been less

sickening. But by sanitizing them, they also would have had less impact, and the impact matters.

And one more thing on this before we move on, and this may sound self-serving, it is a risk we have to

take. I know some of you think we're running this stuff simply because we believe we'll get good

ratings. You are wrong. I find them so repulsive. I rather suspect many of you will not watch

them at all. That preamble diffused much of the criticism CNN surely anticipated. But some questions

remain, and I'm pleased to say Aaron Brown has agreed to consider them. Welcome to the show. Thank you. So first I have to ask, if showing these tapes isn't, at least in part,

about ratings, why spread them out over a series of reports over an entire week? Why not do a one-day

special edition? Why run the disturbing clips again and again? Let me make two points about it.

The piece I wrote that you quote on Monday,

I was talking about specifically the gassing of the dog

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