Reporting Hostage Crises: Who's in Charge of Television?

Abstract

ELEVisiON coverage of hostage crises has brought a new dimension to an old problem. Thanks to the technology of modern news reporting, a story unfolds hour by hour, day by day in full public view, bringing home to the American people as never before the helplessness and humiliation of their government in the face of apparently irrational, inhuman terrorist demands. Television seems such a ubiquitous feature of these episodes that the public has come to associate the attentions of the media apparatus to some degree with the motivation of the hostagetakers. Inevitably, allegations are made that television itself is a major contributor to the problem. It is claimed that television coverage of such incidents abets the terrorists' desires for publicity and manipulates the public's reactions. Many charge that, instead of being a mere observer, recorder, and disseminator of events around the world, television should more properly be considered an active participant in them and a shaping force in determining the political response to them. Any number of authoritative commentators have suggested that the role of television in hostage-taking incidents is less than salutary. After Hanafi Muslims took over the B'nai Brith headquarters in Washington in March 1977, setting off a clamor over television coverage of the siege, four psychiatrists told United Press International that "hostage-taking acts of terrorism feed on publicity and encourage similar events." According to an official at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr.