Electronic Media’s Role in Hostage Crisis : TV: Key to Understanding or Terrorists’ Tool?

As tens of millions around the world listened to the live television broadcast from Damascus, TWA pilot John L. Testrake summed up his feelings at the end of his 16-day ordeal at the hands of Lebanese terrorists and the Amal militia.

“We found that they’re human beings--they have the same emotions, the same fears, the same hopes, the same expectations, the same dreams for their country as we all have,” Testrake said. “In that sense, we were able to empathize with them. We were led to have a deeper understanding of their problems that they’re facing over here.”

Testrake’s statement, with its moving expression of understanding for Lebanese Muslims in their struggle against Israel, underscored the pivotal--and hotly controversial--role the electronic news media played throughout the Beirut crisis: From start to finish, U.S. television networks not only reported events but became a principal vehicle by which the players shaped the unfolding drama.

And some critics charged that the competitive zeal of the networks sometimes led them to become unwitting conduits for the terrorists, who shrewdly used the American media to gain worldwide attention.

As the crisis developed, it was television that relayed the demands of the Shia Muslim hijackers. Television provided American officials and the public with important glimpses into what was going on inside the seized airliner and, later, into the whereabouts and condition of the hostages themselves.

And, in the end, it was television that helped the terrorists score perhaps their biggest propaganda coup, beaming a message that not only portrayed them as sympathetic characters but also ignored the fact that, only days before, the original hijackers had beaten several of their captives and killed one in cold blood.

The stars of the show were Amal militia leader Nabih Berri and hostage spokesman Allyn B. Conwell, 39, an oil company executive from Houston. So closely were they covered by the networks that last Friday, when Conwell was taken to Berri’s house in West Beirut to discuss the health of a fellow hostage, a producer from ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” saw the chance for a scoop.

Conwell, the hostage, went on the air live, even delivering the line “Good morning, America” in his deep, measured tones. “I said I’d like to speak to my wife, and they immediately plugged me in to her in a (telephone) patch,” Conwell, whose wife lives in Corfu, Greece, recounted later.

Such results have led some critics to complain that the networks--fired by a fierce ratings war and the ability to transmit graphic images in an instant--carelessly played into the terrorists’ hands, providing them with saturation coverage that actually may have prolonged the hijacking episode and set the stage for more such incidents.

“It sends a message to future terrorists that one way to get your point home is to seize stray Americans,” worried David R. Gergen, White House communications director during President Reagan’s first term.

David Burke, ABC’s vice president for news, denied that network coverage has been overdone, but he admitted a degree of unease over the implications of television’s intimate involvement in the crisis.

“It’s a fact of life that the technology has become such that . . . if anything happens, you see it right away,” Burke said. “I don’t know whether that’s bad or good. It can be abused. We can be used. . . . The terrorists know full well they put themselves on a stage. What’s the answer? Self-censorship? That’s not good either.”

Some media analysts think self-censorship is indeed the answer. “Something’s got to be done to keep TV from building this up and becoming a mouthpiece for the terrorists,” complained Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group that has been involved in efforts to wrest control of CBS from the network’s present management.

Even Columbia University journalism professor Fred Friendly, a former president of CBS News, suggested that the government might act one day to restrain broadcasts in such situations if the networks failed to curb themselves. Speaking last week on the Public Broadcasting System’s “MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” Friendly said the constant focus of attention on Berri, the Amal leader, has turned him into a “media freak.”

“If the President of the United States or His Holiness the Pope demanded air time, the networks and the stations wouldn’t give it to them,” Friendly said. “Yet these terrorists--and that’s what they are--are shooting their way onto the American air. Enough is enough.”

In contrast, some prominent newspaper editors, whose own reporters found themselves cold-shouldered by the same TV-savvy Shias who cultivated the networks, defended television’s approach to covering the crisis.

“I think television has done a great job,” said Warren Hoge, foreign editor of the New York Times. “. . . All of us--in print as well--get into situations where we are sort of set up for exploitation,” he said, adding that important events still must be covered despite that dilemma.

Alvin Shuster, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, agreed. “You have a situation where everybody is using everybody,” Shuster said. “I don’t believe that you can argue that television was driving the events.”

The networks’ handling of the crisis was watched with keen interest in Israel, which holds the more than 700 Shia prisoners whom the hijackers wanted freed in exchange for the hostages. Calling the hijacking itself a “violent media event” calculated to get press attention, Zev Chafets, press secretary to Menachem Begin when Begin was prime minister, said American television coverage indirectly affected his country even though little of it was aired there.

“What affects Israel is any perception (in the United States) that these terrorists are anything but thugs,” Chafets said in a telephone interview from his Jeruselam home. “What you see here is the ability of the Arab world to work a kind of censorship by force, censorship by terror. That’s an old Arab trick. Its something that reporters in the States ought to be talking about.”

Relatives of hostages who flew to Frankfurt, West Germany, to greet their returning loved ones also felt the competitive pressure of the networks. Some were flown to West Germany at the expense of a network, which also picked up the hotel tab.

At least some of the relatives who checked into the Sheraton Hotel near the Frankfurt airport took rooms under assumed names, and there were reports that their network benefactors went to extraordinary lengths to keep their guests from being interviewed by rival news organizations.

“Those in Beirut weren’t the only hostages,” complained CBS television correspondent John Sheehan, who said his network had not made any such deals.