That is exactly the point. The reality, in this case, is far worse than the mainstream media would have you believe.
I have asked people if they've seen the video or the photos and most people have not. They do not seem to know that it was not a swift guillotine-like beheading.
This evening, at my instigation, a soccer mom earnestly shared with me that she'd "much rather get her head cut off like Nick Berg", than "suffer the atrocities" to which the POW's at Abu Ghraib are being subjected.
(She changed her mind after I--who had already been wound up by this thread--gave her the blow-by-blow account of Nick Berg's final hour.)