They die over and over on continuous loop, the journalist's throat slashed again and again, the bank robber blown up by the bomb locked to his body time after time.

The graphic video and still images of dead and dying people that mainstream news organizations choose not to display inevitably find their way to the Internet, where they can't be killed. Some can be legally challenged, but even if a site is shut down, the image rarely goes away.

And there's a vigorous argument over whether instant access to such images is good or bad: Are they examples of stomach-turning excess or honest depictions of a disturbing world?

There's little disagreement, however, over the Internet's role in eroding the mainstream media's reign as gatekeeper -- the media's decisions to withhold images from their viewers no longer mean viewers won't see those images.

That's what happened when WJET-TV in Erie learned that the complete video sequence showing the death of Brian Douglas Wells, the bank robber who was killed Aug. 28 when a device locked around his neck exploded, was on the Web site of a Washington, D.C., radio shock jock.

Chris Huston, the news director at the ABC and Fox affiliate, said that the video of the explosion shot by one of the station's videographers was released only to ABC in New York, the FBI and a sister station in Buffalo.

"About a week and a half ago, we heard that a rock [radio] station in D.C. called DC101 was doing a link to the explosion video. We looked at it, and it was obviously our video because we were the only ones on Earth who shot it."

DC101, a Clear Channel station, had included the clip in "Elliot's Amazing Videos" a collection of videos promoted on the morning radio personality's Web site.

"We contacted the station and advised them it was copyrighted, that they had no authority to post it, and advised them to get it off immediately. It was gone within 20 minutes.

"However, it since has shown up elsewhere, and it's now all over Internet."

That's called an exercise of First Amendment rights, says Lawrence G. Walters, a Florida-based lawyer whose clients include the owners of ogrish.com, a Web site that showed the footage of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl being killed in 2002, as well as photos of people killed in the Iraq war.

"They get most of the extremely graphic news footage that other news stations refuse to air," Walters said. "There is legitimate interest in seeing what's really happening out there in the world. A lot of people say, 'Let me decide for myself.' "

There are legal issues of the ownership of the images, in which owners have a right to keep others from using them without permission. That's what WJET did. But practically speaking, the owner usually can't maintain control of an image once it's out on the Internet.

Except for the issue of copyright violation, Walters said, Internet use of graphic pictures is a First Amendment no-brainer.

"The Pearl video is a perfect example. Our clients had that up pretty soon after it was released. The rest of the media refused to show it. Government censorship is illegal, but this is a more subtle and, in my opinion, more dangerous form of censorship. A bunch of large corporations get together and say, 'We're going to censor this.' Technically it's legal, because it's private corporations making decisions, though there may be an anti-trust issue."

Self-censorship vs. taste

During this year's U.S. war on Iraq, the collective decision of most mainstream U.S. newspapers and television news stations not to air graphic photographs and video footage of war casualties has been widely criticized abroad, where readers and viewers have gotten a much uglier version of the war.

The Guardian, like many newspapers in Europe, has published photos of war dead during recent conflicts around the world. The British newspaper explained itself in photo editor Eamon McCabe's "Why we must show the dead":

"Every time there is a tragedy or a war, an outcry follows about why newspapers choose to publish photographs of dead bodies. ... And yet tragedies need bodies. ... How can you not have photographs of dead bodies during a war?"

The issue calls into question whether traditional media are practicing ethical journalism or censoring themselves when they choose to withhold certain images.

The question of whether it's appropriate to suppress images of the dead and dying also came up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. U.S. media restricted images of the New York attacks to a plane hitting the World Trade Center tower, panic on the streets below and a few distant shots of people falling from the Twin Towers. The reality of dead and dying bodies was deemed too traumatic for an already traumatized public.

Those who argue for showing such images say they have the power to change history. In the Guardian article, McCabe wrote that sometimes publishing a photo is the only way to prove to people that something happened. From photos of emaciated bodies and survivors of concentration camps, to the on-the-street execution of a prisoner during the Vietnam war, to starving children in Africa, photos of horrific moments of death and dying have made governments change their policies, caused people to change their minds or votes, or made individuals weep and forever change their perception of the world.

But what about 16-year-old footage of Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer's public suicide, available on a number of Web sites (often with commentary every bit as coarse and disturbing as the images).

Or a site with the headings: "squished man," "smeared," "ran over" and "ripped chunk"? Are those images that have news or other value?

Let the people decide, Walters responds. "People say, 'I can evaluate by titles or warnings if I want to see it.'

And those in the news business acknowledge that there's not much they can do to stop it anyway.

"My experience is that stuff like that is going to get out," said Huston, the WJET news director. " My hope [in the case of the Wells video] was simply to slow it down. And we did. It took a couple of weeks for it to leak out.

"We don't know how it got out. It could have been someone in this television station who did it, it could be a college intern at ABC in New York, it could be someone from Buffalo. I'm not inclined to bring a polygraph into the station. It's out there, I don't know how it got out there, I'm sad it got out there, but there appears to be an insatiable appetite for this crap."

Attraction of death

Why do people like pictures of death?

"They're curious what it looks like to get blown up," said Dave LaBelle, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette assistant manager editor/photography, whose book "Lessons in Death and Life" explored death and grieving in words and images. "They want to get as close as possible without getting blown up. They want to see death to try to understand it without dying. That's been the case since the beginning of time."

But the line between acknowledging and catering to that undeniable human instinct is thin, and many in the media defend the gatekeeper role, saying images must be newsworthy. They will continue to try to keep the horrific images from oozing under the back door and onto the Internet.

When the Brian Wells situation began to unfold near his station, WJET's Huston got four videographers on the scene within minutes. They were in place before police cordoned off the area.

The station wasn't broadcasting live continuously, but was doing occasional "cut-ins," showing the scene and updating viewers. There was a continuous feed running in the station, so the newsroom was watching it along with the on-scene photographers.

"We were not broadcasting at the moment of detonation, but that was pure chance. We went off air about two minutes before. It could have gone off while we were on the air, which would have been awful."

They didn't discuss the possibility of catching an explosion because it wasn't at all clear what was going on, Huston said.

"We knew police had this guy cornered, in effect, and we had heard he had some sort of weapon. Now, in retrospect, the story is clear, but at the moment, the idea of this guy in Erie with a bomb around his neck that he couldn't control, nobody could think that that was what was happening."

After the newsroom witnessed the explosion via feeds from the camera operator, "We made an immediate decision not to air it," Huston said.

In subsequent broadcasts, they used footage of Wells sitting on the ground handcuffed, but cut out before the explosion.

The one exception was during a piece examining what FBI investigators were gleaning from forensic analysis of the bomb, which seemed to suggest that it might have been designed to explode outward, injuring others but not Wells. The station aired a still photo of the moment of impact just once, because it was relevant to the story, Huston said.

"We discussed it in the newsroom and decided that in this limited application it was appropriate. Then I put it away, and don't plan to use it again. I modeled my decision after the networks' decision to stop using [images of] the plane's impact into the tower after 9/11 unless we have a specific news reason."