TV Examines Its Excesses

By Thomas Griffith

Now that the tension and rivalry of the hostage crisis are over, the television networks are examining their own performances. Even the most gung ho among them admit to some doubts. Anchors, cameramen, reporters worked long hours, often in dangerous circumstances, yet some of the response seems less out of gratitude than concern over television's excesses. Savoring the drama, the public was also concerned about the national interest.

Most viewers were probably only irritated by the unseemly scrambling among photographers or the squabbling among networks. They already suspect that journalistic enterprise is not unwaveringly high-minded. More troubling was the belief that television egged on the hijackers by providing such visibility for their propaganda. "We were far too available to every side," said John Chancellor, NBC's senior news commentator. "Our failure to control ownership of the story may have been the problem."

Every local station with a hostage family in the area got into the act, and the most touching or most mawkish family response made it to the networks. George Will complained about the "pornography of grief" in hostage-family coverage, and on a talk show he asked Secretary of State George Shultz whether "we are so paralyzed by 40 lives" that our foreign policy was jeopardized. Some word-processor warriors were quite ready to sacrifice the hostages in their eagerness for "bold" retaliatory action, usually unspecified. C.D. Jackson, who served on General Eisenhower's wartime staff, used to call such macho talk "making tiny fists in your pocket."

When Secretary Shultz on This Week with David Brinkley insisted that there was "no connection" between the hostages and the prisoners held by Israel and that "it's important for us not to allow a group of terrorists to create a connection by asserting it," he laid the grounds for Reagan to claim he had not rewarded terrorism when the swap later came off. If this course was politically advantageous to Reagan, it was also part of a set of tactical understandings that were crucial to freeing the hostages. The press finds such unacknowledged arrangements hard to accept. It created a particularly sticky problem for shows such as Brinkley's and Meet the Press, which rely on harrying public figures into quotable answers, while their guests, grateful for the exposure, grin back at their tormentors. This time guests responded with some asperity. Shultz warned his questioners about "daring" Reagan, "as you are doing here." Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, speaking from Israel, accused the press of creating tension that didn't exist between the U.S. and Israel. Diplomatic guests were invited to concede that the maneuvers were all "phony talk" and charades. The day the hostages' release was announced, ABC's Sam Donaldson tried to bait former Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger: "The terrorists won, right?" Many viewers must have cheered those guests who stood their ground.

Television news executives grow quite defensive about newspaper critics of their coverage. "Those critics, usually 40 years or older, know they're not being misled by things said on TV but think others will be," says Richard Wald, senior vice president of ABC News. He thinks they underestimate how quickly viewers read a scene and decide that someone is playing a role or "has to say that." Howard Stringer, executive vice president of CBS News, recalls shots of hostages in a darkened spot: "Their surly answers showed they were under duress." Far from prolonging the crisis, Stringer believes that TV coverage "made it hard to kill the hostages or even to keep them."

TV's maudlin excesses cry out for more self-restraint, and the competitive haggling with terrorists for exclusives is obscene; but it is hard to fault television for photographing hostages when it could, so that families could see and judge their condition. The belief that every American life is of value can indeed be exploited by others, but it is part of what makes us the kind of people we are.