Unsurprisingly, Arab media are downplaying and ignoring the beheading of Nick Berg. It takes air time away from the much more important prison abuse scandal.

Lebanon’s private Al Hayat-LBC station led its bulletins Wednesday with the video. Its news presenter said: “We apologize to our viewers for not showing the entire tape because of the ugliness of the scene.”

Kuwait state television broadcast the news of the execution late Tuesday but not the video.

Iraqi newspapers reported nothing about the killing, although it may have broken to late for them.

Egypt’s leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading Wednesday. Two other major pro-government newspapers ran news agency reports on their inside pages, without photos.

An Al-Ahram editor, Ahmed Reda, said the news came too late Tuesday night for the paper to confirm the video’s authenticity with the U.S. government.

Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report it at all.

A professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, Hussein Amin, said the handling of the story by Egypt’s pro-government papers was political and appropriate.

“I think that the government does not want to show this on the front page as a main item because it shows a very poor — poor is not the proper word; disgusting maybe is the better word — example of revenge,” Amin said. “There is also the threat that it could be happening to other Americans. If they put it on the front page, (it could be seen as) they are favoring this kind of action.”

Jordanian newspapers, state television and radio reported Berg’s killing, but without commentary.

Most Lebanese newspapers, such as the left-wing As-Safir, published the report and a photograph of Berg sitting in front of the militants. As-Safir ran the headline: “Al-Zarqawi slaughters an American to avenge Iraqi prisoners.”

In many Arab newspapers, the beheading received less display than the news of America’s imposing sanctions on Syria and the killing of six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City.