Film Documents Moment-to-Moment Tension in Tv Coverage of Hostage Crisis
Images of masked militants commanding the world stage haunted my thoughts in the late summer of 1972.
I had long forgotten that the events leading to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games in Munich that year took place on a single day. Given how long we had watched on television everything as it unfolded hour after hour, it seemed more like a week. It took viewing the 1999 documentary One Day in September to correct my faulty recollections.
Pictures of the terrorists stalking around the balcony of that Olympic Village apartment complex and peeking their heads out of doors became seared indelibly into my brain. The follow-up coverage in news magazines afterward reinforced these disturbing memories.
Like many people who witnessed this tragedy, I had no idea what it was all about. Most of us have since then become much more aware of the complicated dynamics driving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But back then, it was a mystery.
Numerous staff members of ABC Sports knew little about the situation as well when circumstances thrust them into the middle of the Olympic hostage crisis. Released Dec. 13 in the United States, the movie September 5 chronicles the moment-to-moment decisions made by these individuals to cover the story as best they could. The film is available on several streaming platforms.
ABC Sports had been televising the Summer Olympic Games since 1968. Germany, meanwhile, hadn’t hosted this event for more than three decades — and officials there believed they had something to prove.
“The 1972 Munich Olympics were viewed by their German hosts as a chance to leave the country’s history behind,” according to a story published July 24, 2024, by The Washington Post. “Munich had sought the Games in a bid to change Germany’s global reputation. No German city had hosted them since 1936, when Adolf Hitler used the international stage afforded by the Berlin Olympics to promote Nazi propaganda. Although World War II had long ended, the Berlin Wall would not fall for 17 more years. The divided nation was eager to shed the Nazi memory that continued to dominate the country’s global profile, so West Germany hoped to project an image of happiness and unity, both to spectators in the Munich stands and audience members tuning in on television.”
German authorities opted to use unarmed security agents inside the Olympic Village and at sporting events. They wanted to downplay their nation’s history of militarism.
Naturally, this gave members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September an opportunity to carry out their plan.
ABC Sports staff members first discovered something was going on in the Olympic Village when they heard gunfire early that morning. September 5 documents how they proceed with their coverage over the next 20-plus hours.
The film stars Peter Sarsgaard as ABC Sports President Roone Arledge; John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, who oversaw the control room that day; Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader, vice president for Olympic operations for ABC Sports; Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt, a German translator; and Benjamin Walker as longtime ABC News reporter/anchor Peter Jennings. They interact superbly to convey the tension and confusion inside the control room but also the determination as journalists to present the events occurring in Munich with as much clarity as possible.
Arledge finds he needs to battle other networks to maintain access to the space satellite providing live coverage as well as ABC executives who want the news division back in the United States to take over the story. Bader feels compelled to remind his colleagues of how their coverage may upset viewers around the world and affect decisions being made at the scene.
Jennings, at that time the Middle East bureau chief for ABC News, objects to referring to members of Black September as “terrorists”; he wants those in charge to be mindful of the complex issues at stake. Mason struggles to respond to the demands of the first act of terrorism ever broadcast live on television. Gebhardt looks on in horror as her native Germany once again fails to protect Jews.
As viewers, we see and hear what ABC Sports staff members see and hear in the control room. This allows us to observe how decisions are made each minute by a television production crew.
It’s gripping and tells this story in a new and effective way. While we know the outcome of this crisis, we somehow still cling to hope that some act will liberate the Israeli hostages.
Sadly, history tells us this won’t turn out for the better. The terrorists murdered all nine of the hostages — David Berger, Ze’ev Friedman, Yossef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer and Yakov Springer — as they were held captive in two helicopters at a nearby airport. Two Israelis — Yossef Romano and Moshe Weinberg — were killed when the siege first took place, leaving 11 Israeli families and millions of people around the world grief stricken.
September 5 uses actual footage of ABC sportscaster Jim McKay relaying the events as they unfold. I vividly remember his somber remarks when news broke late that evening that a rescue attempt had failed.
“You know, my dad used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized,” he said. “Well, our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said there were 11 Israeli hostages; two were killed in their rooms. Nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.”
The issue of what motivated the terrorists to engage in such evil is not addressed in September 5, and that disturbed some viewers. But I believe the movie was prudent in not delving into that problem.
As we’ve seen with the slaughter and kidnapping of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ongoing war in Gaza, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is no closer to being resolved than it was in 1972. What’s different now is that many of us have familiarized ourselves with the facts of this region’s history, and deciding what aspects of this are most important has divided us in unfortunate ways.
There were undoubtedly discussions about this among ABC Sports staffers at that time. However, I’m not sure the film could have tried to examine the causes of the intense animosity between Israelis and Palestinians without appearing to favor one side or the other.
Its focus is on what these control room crew members experienced and how they told the story. The coverage they provided was unprecedented and historic.
They took enormous risks and, at times, erred in their decisions. But as a longtime journalist, I’m proud to see the extraordinary work they did under incredibly difficult circumstances. September 5gives us a glimpse into a world we rarely see as it documents a tragedy we should never forget.