Excluded from the Big Moment

By Thomas Griffith

Anyone who spent much time at the television set, as millions did, during a fortnight of American rites--the Inaugural, the flight home of the hostages, the Super Bowl with its quasi minute of silent prayer--saw some memorable moments. But the proportion of the memorable to the banal, the overhyped, the stage waits, the garrulous monologues when nothing was happening, was about 1 to 10.

The great emotional climax of all these months, the reunion of the hostages and their families, fortunately occurred offscreen, in privacy. Would it have happened in privacy if the press had had its way? The uncomfortable answer, which the press should be willing to face about itself, is no. Had the hostages not been Government employees, had they not been flown out by the Government, sequestered by the Government first in Wiesbaden then at West Point, with the press held at bay by military police, no feeling of ethical restraint or human sympathy would have kept the cameras from zooming in on those first awkward, tense moments of families reunited. At times journalism is a ghoulish trade. A good many voyeurs in the audience, of course, would have been delighted to invade such a private moment, which is why the press does such things. Perhaps many in the press were relieved that matters had been taken out of their hands. Those scenes would have been filmed not because the American press is unfeeling (only some of its members are), but because it is free and competitive, and therefore compulsive.

The attitude is: what any might do, the others had better do. Since in a free press any number can demand credentials, around 1,000 reporters and cameramen, mostly American, jostled for position at Wiesbaden. In a speech not long ago, Reuven Frank, ex-president of NBC News, asked:

"How often is the reporter there to find out what is going on, and how often is the reporter there so it looks like we have a reporter there?"

(And how often does a television reporter ask an uninformed question so that his station's camera can display his presence on-screen?) Sucked into such a situation, a number of reporters had troubling problems with their own roles last week. Many had come to know and like hostage families, and the liking was reciprocated. But there also had been other experiences.

Denied the chance to photograph the moments of reunion, the press had to settle for a morning-after press conference, with the hostages impersonally lined up like the Soviet Presidium. It wasn't the cozy atmosphere that TV interviewers favor. The first question asked at the press conference was not even about the hostages' welfare, or about their families: it was Daniel Schorr wanting to know the hostages' attitude toward the press. Did Schorr expect a testimonial from them, or would he have been just as happy (since TV interviewers like to elicit on-screen emotion) had someone flared at him? Afterward, NBC's Linda Ellerbee, mad as a wet hen, complained on the air about "the controlled scene," the "sort of official line" she had heard, and the welcome home-type questions--instead of the presumably sharp ones she would have asked. Over on CBS, Morton Dean was curious as to why only 41 of the 52 hostages were present. Dean demanded of the CBS man on the scene whether it was true, as Dean had been told in Wiesbaden but hadn't been able to confirm, that some of the hostages weren't speaking to others. The CBS man said he didn't know. Well, if Morton Dean had not been able to confirm it, why was he now floating such a report over the air?

With its usual technical finesse, television effectively covered the ceremony on the White House Lawn, letting a moving ceremony speak for itself. But at other times, kept at arm's length from the hostages, forced to show crowds cheering rows of passing buses in which few of the hostages could be glimpsed, television seemed desperately to be injecting avowals of anchormanly emotion into scenes lacking emotion on the screen. Journalism as theater, which TV news is, was having its problems. But after those first sequestered days, the hostages had plenty of chance to tell of their experiences, to sit for one-on-one interviews. The public's right to know, and chance to know, was still intact.

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