The continuum from ‘September 5′ to October 7

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Like 9/11, some events eventually are shorthanded into dates. Such as Oct. 7, now signifying the day in 2023 when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. But before both of those dark dates came Sept. 5, 1972, when members of the Black September Palestinian terrorist group scaled a wall at the Olympic Village during the Summer Games and took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches captive, initially killing two and triggering a globally watched hostage drama that played out live on TV.

The Olympics were in Munich, the city that became a metaphor for appeasement of Nazi Germany, but Black September’s nihilism gave Munich a new meaning. (As did Steven Spielberg’s splendid, Oscar-nominated 2005 film “Munich,” which explored the moral ambiguities of Israel’s assassination campaign against some of the attack’s remaining perpetrators.)

Appropriately, “September 5″ is the title of a new thriller now showing locally. The film’s focus, however, isn’t as much on the terrorists and Olympians or the enduring enmity between Palestinians and Israelis; rather, this story is about those who brought the world the story: ABC Sports journalists, and the nearly minute-by-minute media ethics decisions they had to make during what seemed to be an unreal and unprecedented event.

The carnage and coverage in Munich were a milestone.

Up until then, “I can’t think of another example of something of this magnitude unfolding in real time being covered by international media,” said Jane Kirtley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law.

“Beyond the incident, two really big things came out of this watershed event,” said Matthew Levitt, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. “The development of more specially qualified counterterrorism forces, because there was a tremendous amount of mistakes the police force made in that case, and also the issue of the media, both from a terrorist perspective of wanting media coverage and also the media’s perspective of grappling with some really heavy moral and ethical questions.”

These two really big things are at the crux of “September 5,” giving the gripping film a tension even though the conclusion is historical fact.

For instance, in one scene Geoff Mason, the basically rookie producer, trains ABC’s cameras on two members of the basically rookie local police force as they climb on the roof of an Olympic Village building.

“Now, police are on the roof,” narrates Peter Jennings, at the time a Middle East correspondent dispatched to Europe to cover what were dubbed the “serene Games” only to find himself in the thick of the Mideast’s defining dispute.

“Whoa, guys,” says a tech operator, pointing to a ghostly image of a screen from inside the Israelis’ room, prompting Mason to say, “That’s a TV. Are they seeing what we’re seeing? … Are the terrorists seeing this?”

They were. And that wasn’t the only mistake made by ABC, which didn’t even know what to call the attackers. (The now-ubiquitous “terrorist” was chosen by ABC Sports’ top exec Roone Arledge because that’s what the Munich Police called them.) The consequences — considered in real time as Arledge fought CBS for satellite time (remarkably, ABC’s feed went dark at the height of the crisis) and fought network brass over keeping possession of the story unfolding hundreds of yards in front of them instead of turning it over to ABC News thousands of miles away — were stark.

Ultimately, Sports won the “tug-of-war” on “who was going to own this story,” said Kirtley. That decision paid off, she added, and was an example of how “a journalist is a journalist is a journalist.”

A more profound tug-of-war, between the militants and the media, is depicted in dialogue between Arledge, Mason and Mason’s mentor, Marvin Bader.

“They know the whole world is watching,” Bader heatedly warns. “If they shoot someone on live television, whose story is that? Is it ours? Or is it theirs?

Today, terrorists make it theirs, said Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Truzman, who edits FDD’s “Long War Journal,” expounded in an email interview that “in today’s landscape, a group seeking recognition as a legitimate and established armed organization must possess a media arm.”

Entities like ISIS, al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, he added, “have all developed robust media operations that disseminate statements and relevant information. The media component has become indispensable, particularly in the era of social media. These groups frequently produce high-quality content designed to attract potential recruits. Equally, their media arms serve to issue statements and disseminate videos of attacks that are generally picked up by major news outlets, amplifying the group’s reach on a global scale.”

In the film, Arledge gloats over that global scale, telling Bader that “we’re making broadcast history. More people have watched this than watched Armstrong land on the moon.”

Such reach requires responsibility — something wrestled with on Sept. 5 up to today. Only nowadays, journalists may have even less time to reflect on ethical dilemmas.

“The kind of instantaneous transmission that we now have in our new media landscape means that it’s a lot harder to take a beat and to stop and think, ‘Is this really something that is going to minimize harm?’” said Kirtley.

“As journalists,” she continued, “I think our impulse is to tell everything we know, but we have to temper that with the notion of, ‘Are we going to make the situation worse?’” Reflecting on that era’s tech (faithfully and fascinatingly recreated in the movie), she observed that the “sort of pause in operations that was possible in Munich in 1972 really doesn’t exist anymore.”

And yet, while media machines evolve, media morality is timeless.

“There’s a long laundry list of really heavy ethical questions,” said Levitt, mentioning modern dilemmas that were also faced by ABC Sports in Munich. Media, he said, “has been grappling with what’s appropriate, what’s not, for a long time.”

Kirtley concurs. “The technology has changed,” she said, “but the calculation is still pretty much the same.” Your “goal, first and foremost, is to serve the public interest, to get the information that the public needs to know. Sometimes it’s in real time. Sometimes the case can be made for postponing it. Although not for burying it.”

According to the portrayal in “September 5,″ nothing of that day’s infamy was buried. Some things should have been delayed. But under more pressure than the athletes they were sent to cover, the journalists at ABC Sports were Olympian in their own right, behind and in front of the camera.

Including studio host Jim McKay, who had to tragically intone the scale and scope of the tragedy: “They’re all gone,” he famously said, speaking of innocent Israeli Olympians, but not of a terrorist era that spans Sept. 5 to Oct. 7 and beyond.