Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts

Picture a warm and sunny day, not in Athens or Cairo, but in Washington. The Israeli prime minister is in town and is scheduled to meet the president.

At 11 a.m., the leader of an obscure Muslim sect and several accomplices armed with guns and machetes storm the headquarters of B'nai B'rith. Three other members of the group seize the city's Islamic Center and two more fanatics invade City Hall, killing a radio reporter in the process. Altogether, the terrorists take 134 hostages in three buildings by gunpoint, force them to the floor and threaten to kill them unless their demands are met.

The news media, as one might expect, descend on the scene en masse. Live television pictures carrying the group's warnings and demands soon go forth over the airwaves. One hundred and thirty-four lives hang in the balance, as reporters compete to get exclusive interviews with the terrorists.

This crisis actually happened, on March 9, 1977, when the Hanafi Muslims staged a terrorist attack on the very day Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was meeting with President Jimmy Carter. Happily, it ended with the surrender of the terrorists and no further loss of life.

The Hanafi incident illustrated a troubling fact about modern terrorism: It requires an audience.

The terrorist has to communicate his own ruthlessness -- his "stop-at-nothing" mentality -- in order to achieve his goals. Media coverage is essential to his purpose.

If terrorism is a form of warfare, as many observers now believe, it is a form in which media exposure is a powerful weapon.

As terrorism increases, we in the news media are being encouraged to restrict our coverage of terrorist actions. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, has proclaimed: "We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend." Many people, including some reporters in the United States, share her view. Most of these observers call for voluntary restraint by the media in covering terrorist actions. But some go so far as to sanction government control -- censorship, in fact -- should the media fail to respond.

I disagree. I am against any government-imposed restrictions on the free flow of information about terrorist acts. Instead, I am in favor of as full and complete coverage of terrorism by the media as is possible. Here are my reasons:

Terrorist acts are impossible to ignore. They are simply too big a story to pass unobserved. If the media did not report them, rumor would abound. And rumors can do much to enflame and worsen a crisis.

There is no compelling evidence that terrorist attacks would cease if the media stopped covering them. On the contrary, terrorism specialists I have consulted believe the terrorists would only increase the number, scope and intensity of their attacks if we tried to ignore them.

Our citizens have a right to know what the government is doing to resolve crises and curb terrorist attacks. Some of the proposed solutions raise disturbing questions about how and when the United States should use military force.