The Israeli hostages are free and a world on edge breathes a sigh of relief. That’s the word from ABC broadcaster Jim McKay, the canary-suited sports anchor who has spent several anxious hours stone-faced in a Munich studio narrating an international crisis.
Shortly before the sun rose over the tenth day of the 1972 Olympic Games, hosted by a reborn Germany eager to reform its wartime image, 11 Israeli athletes were captured by Palestinian extremists who demanded the release of hundreds of prisoners. But now, in a crowded control room not far from the Olympic Village, high-strung producers exhausted by a marathon 23-hour newscast celebrate the successful end of this distressing ordeal. German officials announce that the crisis has concluded. Conrad Ahlers, the spokesman for the West German government, confirms on air that police have rescued the hostages. News outlets proclaim the good news all over Europe.
Yet history is cruel and these optimistic reports were wrong. A botched rescue operation at a German airbase, where the Olympians and their captors had been transported by helicopters, ended in a barrage of gunfire and the deaths of the remaining hostages. Jewish athletes, who days earlier traveled to Dachau for a memorial service, had been beaten, tortured and murdered a few miles away in a post-World War II Germany. “Rarely in recent years has a single news event been so misreported to so many people as the murders in Munich,” reads a September 18, 1972, report in Time magazine, which offered a post-mortem examination of press errors. “In a world of instantaneous communications, everyone knows the news—even when it is false.”
“September 5,” a claustrophobic chronicle of the ABC sports journalists who brought a terrorist attack in full color to 900 million viewers, is a story of confidence and failure. A fast-paced, high-stakes interrogation of journalistic ethics and the awesome power of live television, the film centers on Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the former president of ABC Sports who later became the network’s top news executive, and his colleagues as a breaking news story (with major political implications) tests their instincts and their judgments.
Arledge—portrayed in the film as a hard-driving, ambitious decision maker—brings a take-charge attitude to his coverage of the hostage crisis and repeatedly refuses to give the story to ABC’s news division. Arledge’s reasoning is simple: His crew is in Munich, several yards from the Israeli athletes’ apartment, while the news division is thousands of miles away without live images. He keeps the story, tapping seasoned reporter Peter Jennings to broadcast inside the Olympic Village and sending journalists disguised as athletes inside its perimeter to record footage.
The militants—naming their operation after two Palestinian villages whose Christian residents were forcibly displaced by Israeli forces in 1948—make their intentions clear. They plan to kill one hostage every hour, starting at 12 noon, until their prisoners are freed. A question arises in the control room: Can we show an execution on live television? “We can’t control what happens,” responds Arledge. A journalist counters that the terrified families of the captured Olympians do not want to see their child murdered. Doesn’t that give the terrorists what they want? “We’re following the story wherever it takes us,” Arledge says.
While this dialogue is likely invented, these queries are very real. “September 5” is both a top-notch newsroom thriller and a study of broadcast standards, posing challenging questions about what should and should not be shown as the lives of “nine terrified, living human beings” hang in the balance. Should we call the Palestinian captors “terrorists” or is that too charged a term? How many sources must confirm a tip before we run with it? Aren’t the terrorists watching our broadcast? We said the hostages all survived. Whose fault is that?
As multiple news outlets failed to confirm that the hostages were, indeed, alive before shouting it from the rooftops, the German police continuously failed to get an increasingly dangerous situation under control. Hoping to erase public memory of the 1936 Summer Olympics, a defiant show of strength for a victorious Adolf Hitler and a propaganda campaign for the Nazi Party, Germany deliberately relaxed security measures at the Munich Games and aimed to position itself as a hospitable power. Creative efforts to negotiate with the Palestinian captors, and an aborted attempt to confront the terrorists at gunpoint in the Olympic Village, fell apart as police became increasingly desperate to halt an unfolding catastrophe. In 2012, German media revealed classified documents suggesting that officials ignored advance warnings of a potential attack in Munich. “It is not secret that the German authorities’ handling of the massacre…was characterized by bumbling and cover-ups,” reported Der Spiegel.
The Greek-born filmmaker Costa-Gavras has said that all films are political—and “September 5” is no exception. While the film makes no direct comment on the most recent conflict between Israel and Palestine, its subject matter—how journalists cover the brutalization and murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists—feels ripped from the headlines as Israel faces accusations of war crimes against Palestinian civilians. Rumors have swirled that the Toronto International Film Festival rejected the film to prevent controversy, while staff at a New York City movie theater have derided the picture as “Zionist propaganda” (untrue) and circulated a petition to cancel screenings. On the other hand, a critically-acclaimed documentary on the Israeli-led demolition of Palestinian villages in the West Bank screened at the New York Film Festival but cannot find U.S. distribution.
Considering our nationwide debate on how reporters cover fraught conflicts, and accusations of both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian bias lobbed at the news media, perhaps there is no better time for a film like “September 5.” It is bound to engender discussion and even disagreement regarding its merits and intentions, like good art should.
