Aftermath of TWA Hostage Episode : NBC News Bars PR on ‘Crisis’ Coverage

NBC News, whose publicists heavily publicized the network’s coverage of last June’s TWA hostage crisis in the Middle East, have been barred from doing that sort of thing anymore, NBC News President Lawrence Grossman said Thursday.

He said such self-praise undercut and undermined the solid journalistic work back then by his news staff, and to keep doing it whenever there is a similar crisis is “unseemly, and I think it puts the wrong spin on things.”

So, he said, “we at NBC News have decided to put a ban on our own promotional claims and publicity in the interests of concentrating purely on journalism and the reporting of the moment.”

Grossman, who spoke at a luncheon attended by about 180 delegates to the coming AFL-CIO convention of labor officials at the Anaheim Hilton, said the ban stemmed from an internal study NBC News conducted on its coverage of the TWA hostage crisis.

The study, later made public by NBC, was prompted in part by criticism of the way all three networks covered the crisis, which began when terrorists hijacked a TWA jetliner on June 14.

Grossman, while noting what he called “network bashing and news media bashing” by critics of the networks’ coverage, nonetheless defended television interviews of both the hostages and the terrorists during the 16-day crisis.

Legitimate questions were raised about those interviews, he said, but “it’s much more important that we cover things--even though there are risks and dangers--than we cover them up.” It’s true that, in hostage situations, television at times provides a platform for terrorists, he added, but TV’s presence can help save hostages from injury or death.

And even though the networks were accused of providing an electronic platform for the terrorists who hijacked the TWA jetliner, “I have not heard of a single person” who has defended the terrorists’ actions, he said.