It was a pivotal moment in the history of broadcast news. The live coverage of the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics by an ABC sports team was the first time that a terrorist attack unfolded in real time on television screens across the globe.
The 22 hours of rolling coverage reached 900 million viewers, an unprecedented global audience and more than had watched the human moon landings three years earlier. It transformed not just the media and journalism, but also the way people consume news and process global events.
New film September 5 examines this watershed moment, telling the story from the point of view of the journalists in the control room as they grapple with ethical dilemmas that continue to challenge reporters, editors, producers and digital content creators in today’s digital news era.
For example, what images can you show live and where should you draw a line? How do you balance striving to be first with properly verifying the facts? When does news become entertainment? And what are the dangers of news coverage and content influencing actual events? In the film, we get to see these dilemmas play out in the actions and heated discussions of people confronting them for the first time.
“In some ways this was a Pandora’s box moment,” says Ben Chaplin, the actor who plays Marvin Bader, the head of operations for ABC sports, who wrestled with the team’s collective conscience. “What had been done couldn’t be undone, because it was now possible to do, and millions of people tuned in live.”
John Magaro, who plays the ABC producer Geoffrey Mason, says he hopes that September 5 raises a host of questions for the audience: “What is the purpose of the media? What is their responsibility? What is their role?”
The team of ABC sports journalists, led by legendary TV executive Roone Arledge (played in the film by Peter Sarsgaard), pivoted to news coverage when Palestinian terrorists from the Black September group killed two members of the Israeli Olympics team and took nine of its athletes hostage. The journalists had to improvise and figure out best practices and news values on the fly for a rapidly evolving story, using the limited information and technology available, and under the most intense time pressure.
The film, which has been nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, depicts a series of fraught moments. For instance, when the ABC team realise that their live feed of a rescue attempt by West German police was being watched by the hostage takers – thereby jeopardising the rescue mission. Armed police burst into the control room to stop the broadcast. The episode highlights a dilemma broadcasters often face: how to balance the public’s right to be kept informed of events with the broadcast’s impact on operational security. It also demonstrates why authorities have always been reluctant to allow news organisations uncontrolled access to ongoing operations.
Another danger the ABC journalists grappled with was the risk of getting wrong a big judgment call on the unfolding story against the backdrop of intense competition between news organisations to be first with updates. Nothing jeopardises a news organisation’s credibility more than getting it wrong, and that dilemma has only become more acute as the pace of news has since sped up and competition between news outlets and content platforms has intensified.
One of the enduring consequences of the Munich broadcast was that it played a key role in laying the ground for 24-hour news by demonstrating that continuous live coverage of major events could draw enormous audiences. When Ted Turner launched the rolling news network CNN in 1980, he already had strong evidence of its commercial potential.
Critics of rolling news have drawn attention to the ways in which 24-hour coverage can all too often recast news as entertainment – or “infotainment”. CNN’s coverage of the Gulf war of 1990-1991 would come to epitomise the notion of news as pure spectacle, and there have been countless examples since then where imagery, footage and spectacle have come to define events. In more recent years, terrorists have used social media to broadcast their atrocities themselves, posing a raft of new challenges.
Chaplin hopes the film will help people understand new dilemmas being faced today. “I think we might be at a similar moment in terms of technology being ahead of our understanding of how to mitigate for its side effects, its unforeseen consequences and its potential for influence – both intentional and unintentional – on events in the real world,” he says. “So the film is vitally relevant and brings up questions that are desperately in need of consideration and answers right now, more than ever.”
His co-star Sarsgaard says he hopes the film’s audiences will engage with these conversations: “I’m interested in what people get out of it and whether it gets them talking. Who gets to tell the story? How is the story told when we have all of these cameras going at once, when we see violence constantly on the news? Does it make us more empathetic, or does it inure us from what is actually going on? It’s all worth talking about.”
SEPTEMBER 5
In cinemas February 6
Discover more and watch the trailer
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