Curb Terrorists’ Media Access, Thatcher Urges

In an address today to about 10,000 American lawyers, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher suggested that news organizations agree on a voluntary code to deny terrorists access to world news media.

Thatcher, a lawyer herself, spoke to members of the American Bar Assn. in the Royal Albert Hall as the ABA’s annual weeklong convention filled London hotels, theaters and restaurants in the largest convention ever held in London.

“We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend,” she said.

‘Voluntary Code’

“In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship,” she added. “But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show any thing which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted?”

Thatcher’s aides have said she was shocked at news coverage of last month’s TWA hijacking in Beirut and the way television news reports gave what she thought was excessive publicity to the hijackers.

Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, speaking to an earlier ABA panel discussion on terrorism, said the West must not abandon its fundamental liberties in the face of terrorist attack.

Nations Should Unite

Mondale said the community of civilized nations “should join as one” to combat terrorists by refusing to accede to their demands, by exchanging information on terrorist organizations and by shunning other countries that harbor terrorists.

The key to success against terrorists, he said, lay in the political will to combat them. He said that will is lacking in some countries despite a broad network of agreements.

Mondale, who endured the Iranian hostage crisis as vice president to Jimmy Carter, said: “I don’t believe we received the international support we should have had.”