As the Islamic terror group ISIS releases video showing the beheading of another Western hostage, Dan Rather and Jeff Greenfield discuss whether news organizations should be giving airtime to these videos. Does it serve a public interest or is it giving the terror group the publicity that they want - or both?

"This is the first social media war," Rather said. "In the way the Vietnam War was the first television war, this is the first social media war. ISIS has proved to be very adept, very talented, if you will - you always hope evil won't be - in ratcheting up the hysteria, ratcheting up the image of their influence far beyond what their actual military capabilities are."

Greenfield said the existence of the videos "tends to force, I think, our policymakers into taking decisions they might not take absent the emotional punch of those pictures. They tend to maybe say more than what reality lets them say."

In the above video, Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's most senior counterterrorism adviser during President Obama's first term, tells Brian Stelter that media outlets have been overstating the threat that ISIS poses to the U.S. homeland.

Benjamin was quoted in The New York Times this week saying that public discussion of the threat has been a "farce."

"I do think ISIS is a very serious challenge," Benjamin told Stelter. "But the public debate has really lost touch with reality."

"We've had a lot of people from Congress suggesting that there were plots in the offing that are completely unrealistic. We've had senators talking about bombs that will destroy whole cities, cities in flames. We’ve had governors talking about ISIS operatives streaming across the southern border. And we've had an awful lot in the media about simply preposterous plots about spraying Ebola all over transit systems, about cities being honeycombed with sleeper cells. And yet, at the same time, those senior-most officials in the government who deal with counterterrorism have said time and again there is no imminent threat."

With regards to media outlets, Benjamin said that "the argument that it’s not that titanic a threat is not really a great sell on the airwaves, so we've had competing talking heads who have been trying to top each other with outrageous scenarios. And I'm afraid that this is the way the market goes in reporting on terrorism all too often."

New York Times Baghdad bureau chief Tim Arango tells Brian Stelter about his experience reporting from Iraq and the perils journalists face when trying to cover ISIS.

Rep. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the use of force authorization in Afghanistan in 2001, talks to Brian Stelter about why we hear so few anti-war voices on cable news.

Lee said that in her experience, voices of dissent are rarely "called to be on the media and in the press to have these kinds of discussions."

"I think it is, in many ways, derelict, because we are here to make sure that people know what is going on, that they understand the issues, that they know what the crises are about, so they can really understand what the solutions could be. But if they the only have one point of view, that's the point of view they take and embrace."

Asked about polls that show Americans are "increasingly concerned that ISIS represents a direct terror threat," Lee suggested news organizations are partly responsible: "The media has really focused on a lot of the very terrible things that are going on."

"I think it is important... that we not allow fear to settle in."