Editor Seeks Consensus on Press Coverage of Acts by Terrorists

The president of the Associated Press Managing Editors Assn. called Monday for a conference by print and broadcast journalists to study coverage of terrorist acts “to avoid the excesses that marked the coverage of the TWA hijacking.”

“While reasonable people differ in their degree of criticism, I don’t think anyone sees coverage of the TWA hijacking as journalism’s finest hour,” the association’s president, Michael J. Davies of the Hartford Courant, said at the group’s annual convention.

In the June 14 hijacking, Shia Moslems seized TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome. More than two weeks later, 39 American hostages were freed. One American was killed.

The extensive news coverage of the hijacking included the broadcasting by all three networks of a taped interview with the hostages conducted by one of their captors. In addition, news reports about the location of the U.S. Delta Force, an anti-terrorist group, may have made a rescue impossible, some critics have said.

Publicity about terrorist acts is the “lifeblood of terrorism,” Davies said.

“Yet few responsible critics would suggest that the media enter into a conspiracy of silence that would ignore all acts of international terrorism,” said Davies, who is editor, publisher and chief executive officer of the Courant.

He said one or more conferences by journalists on this issue might produce a consensus on some voluntary restraints on coverage.

“What is left, then, is for us to find some reasonable middle ground, a field wide enough to enable us to serve society’s need for adequate information about important events and narrow enough to avoid the excesses that marked the coverage of the TWA hijacking,” he said.

The Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Courant and the Los Angeles Times, is willing to underwrite the costs of an initial symposium, Davies said.

Six Americans remain hostage in Lebanon, including Terry Anderson, the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent.