TigerHawk

As previously reported more than one, I am loving Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Among its many merits, Guests reminds us that nothing much has changed. Consider the skill with which the terrorists who invaded our embassy and took our diplomats hostage manipulated the media to undermine support for the sitting American President. The long excerpt below (which I will "pay" for by encouraging you to buy the book) is so reminiscent of today's debate over the role of the press in war that one can only wonder whether the jihad will always have our number, and whether the mainstream media will always fall for it. I've bolded certain bits to promote your discussion in the comments:

On the tenth of December [1979], NBC-TV aired an eighteen-minute interview with Marine hostage Billy Gallegos, the first with a hostage broadcast in the United States...

So far, the students seemed to see the American press as an ally. It made for a strange situation. The United States was, in effect, in a stalemated state of war with Iran, but while fifty-three of their countrymen were being held prisoner, dozens of American journalists moved freely in Tehran, scrambling to get access to the compound and the captives. ABC's Peter Jennings was among them, wandering the streets to solicit the opinions of random Iranians and doing feature stories about post-revolutionary life. The other networks had their own regular correspondents on the scene, as did most major American newspapers, and it was clear from some of the footage shown on TV that they had established a rapport with the dapper foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who made himself available daily. Yet the United States government, by all appearances, was unable even to start a dialogue with the country's rulers. Many of the TV correspondents would set up for their nightly broadcasts immediately outside the embassy gates, surrounded by Iranians chanting "Death to America!" and "Death to Carter." Rarely was this rhetorical hostility directed at the American journalists personally. Thomas Fenton, a CBS correspondent, was confronted once outside the embassy by an Iranian who shouted at him accusingly, "CIA!"

"No, CBS!" Fenton retorted, which got a laugh.

No one had succeeded in getting access to the hostages, so when the major TV networks were approached with an offer to participate in the Gallegos interview, their executives were eager. But the students demanded that all questions be submitted in advance, that the interview be aired in prime time in its entirety with no editing, and that the students be allowed to ask questions and make statements on the film. None of the networks accepted the initial terms, but the big three, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were eager to bargain. Eventually NBC came to terms. They would be allowed to question the hostage with their own correspondents, Fred Francis and George Lewis, and they did not have to clear their questions in advance. A student would be allowed to make an opening and closing statement. Nilufar Ebtekar [a female interrogator/translator who had lived in Philadelphia - ed.] was chosen by the council, because of her fluent English and because the council liked the idea of having their arguments presented by a woman. At first, Ebtekar was reluctant to appear on camera, but she agreed when it was decided to identify her only as "Mary."

She and the other hostage takers had been mystified by the lack of American support for their action, particularly the lack of sympathy from American blacks and other "oppressed minorities," and had concluded that their problem was media censorship in the United States. The American government was blocking and distorting their message. One effort to break through this supposed censorship was a half-page ad in The New York Times (the Washington Post refused to run it) calling on Americans to "Rise Up Against Oppression," referring to the hostages as "spies" and placing Carter in "the vanguard of the world's oppressors." The Gallegos interview was part of this publicity campaign. The students demanded that Ebtekar's remarks be presented unedited and in their entirety. In fact, the justifications and complaints of Iranian hostage takers had become tiresomely familiar to Americans, but when NBC proposed trimming her harangue by about two minutes the students held fast. Ebtekar interpreted the request to edit her speech as proof that there existed a secret U.S. government rule prohibiting, as she would put it, the broadcast of any "anti-government declaration lasting longer than five minutes."

Her chubby frame draped in dark robes and her head wrapped in a powder blue scarf, Ebtekar lectured the American people in her perfect American English about the evils of their government and accused the shah of "the largest thefts and exploitations of history."

Gallegos sat in the chancery library beneath a portrait of Khomeini. He had agreed in advance not to describe where he was being kept on the embassy grounds or to describe the security procedures. The young Marine was one of the students' favorites. He was chosen for the interview by their governing council because of his "honesty and simplicity," which suggested he was not likely to be unpredictable, because his behavior had been docile, and because his background was "Latin." In the interview the young Marine spoke of his impatience and argued for handing over the shah....

Carter was furious with the network for airing the interview. The flood of reporting from Iran during the crisis had been both aggravating and helpful; the nightly reports were being scrutinized carefully in the Pentagon for scraps of information about how the gates were guarded, what kinds of weapons the students carried, etc., but apart from this practical value, the constant network focus on the crisis played into the hands of the hostage takers. The more attention they got, the more convinced they were of their own importance, and the more pressure was put on the White House to react, either to give in to this infuriating extortion or to lash out at Iran in a way that would almost certainly make the situation worse for the hostages, if not kill them. There was no danger of "Mary's" lecture finding sympathetic American ears. A small woman dressed like a nun hectoring the American people in their own living rooms about the sins of their government made for a unique national TV event that no doubt swelled the ranks of those who preferred to nuke Tehran and be done with it. What Carter needed most was for this story to fade off the front pages, so that the students could be isolated as a troublemaking fringe and sensible people in Iran would again dare to assert control.

House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill condemned the network for airing Iranian "propaganda." Ford Rowan, NBC's Pentagon correspondent, no doubt getting an earful from his military sources, resigned in protest. (pp. 245-248)

An American president, locked in a seemingly intractible contest of wills in the Middle East, finds his options narrowed by the American media, which makes editorial judgments that favor the interests of America's enemies over its own government. The leaders of his own party denounce the press for promoting the enemy's propaganda. What has, and has not, changed in the last 27 years?

One thing, perhaps. Can anybody imagine a network correspondent today resigning his job for the reason Ford Rowan gave in 1979?