Behind the lens: The untold story of ABC’s coverage of the Munich massacre
On September 5, 1972, the world witnessed a harrowing event unfold live on television. Members of the militant Palestinian group Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, taking the Israeli team hostage. The film “September 5” delves into the American TV network’s sports crew’s efforts to cover this monumental event. Their decisions, for better or worse, made history, as ABC became the first network to broadcast an act of terrorism live.
A historical broadcast
Even those who weren’t alive at the time likely have a good grasp of the events, partly due to Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich,” which opens with a reenactment of the massacre. In the tense opening minutes of that movie, Spielberg highlights one of the core reasons why Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s focus on the media is so compelling: ABC’s live coverage was so thorough that both the terrorists and the hostages’ families could follow along in real-time, learning about the authorities’ actions via the broadcast.
Ethical dilemmas in live coverage
Details like these raise important ethical questions about the incident that still resonate today. Countless crises have since required similarly tricky journalistic judgment calls, though none have yielded the record 29 Emmys that ABC collected for its coverage. These awards celebrate the achievement but gloss over some of the more philosophical aspects of the control-room scramble, which Fehlbaum weaves throughout his 94-minute docudrama. The film’s relevance is also heightened by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, as the repercussions of recent events continue to unfold.
A focus on the newsroom
Fehlbaum’s no-nonsense treatment, co-written with Munich-born Moritz Binder, doesn’t delve into the politics of the massacre. Instead, it focuses on the ABC Sports team and their actions throughout the ordeal. Those expecting a more “Munich”-like approach may be surprised to find that the film’s reenactments don’t depict Black September’s actions but rather what the ABC Sports team was doing. The Spielberg film this most resembles is “The Post,” with its flurry of trying to act responsibly amid the pressures of a breaking-news environment.
Watch the trailer for The Post
The key players
The seasoned shot-caller here is Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who springs into action the moment gunshots are fired off-screen, insisting, “We’re not giving this story to News. … Sports is keeping it.” Thirty years later, Arledge was described as “the most important behind-the-scenes figure in the television coverage of major events.”
“September 5” takes us behind the scenes of the 17-hour ordeal, beginning shortly before the attack and ending just after the tragic finale, when Wide World of Sports host Jim McKay famously confirmed the chilling news, “They’re all gone,” on air. The film focuses primarily on a young, ambitious producer (played by John Magaro) whose actions are directly informed by veteran sports broadcaster Geoffrey Mason’s memories of events.
Gender dynamics and newsroom politics
The ABC Sports team is small and almost entirely male, except for a German-speaking crew member named Marianne (Leonie Benesch), who plays a crucial role throughout. The way she’s treated — and repeatedly underestimated — due to her gender adds another layer of critique to the movie’s complex power dynamics, which extend to the more cautious corporate players, like operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin).
The pitfalls of live reporting
ABC Sports may have gotten the story, but they also got it wrong, prematurely repeating an unconfirmed report that the hostages were recovered safely. Moritz and Fehlbaum’s script lacks the punchy, pressure-cooking sparring quality of inside-baseball series like “The Morning Show” or Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” which can leave one feeling like the real story is happening elsewhere — and it is, since there’s only so much that news crews can extrapolate from telephoto lenses trained on a faraway balcony.
Watch the trailer for The Morning Show
Revisiting history
When events like this happen live, our imaginations tend to fill in what can’t be seen with the worst. Revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened in advance doesn’t preclude us from wanting to better understand the events. However, this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom: the significance of the words “as we’re hearing,” versus the reality of what transpired during the climactic disaster at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase.
Multiple well-told accounts already exist of the Munich massacre, making the movie’s blind spots fairly easy to forgive. Fehlbaum presents this almost like a documentary, using handheld camerawork and digital post-production to inject a sense of slightly manufactured realism. Not all the cast members got the memo; some performances seem stilted opposite Sarsgaard and Magaro, whose characters are torn between fear of uncertainty and a desire for accuracy at every moment. They’re in uncharted territory, facing tough calls at every turn, like, “Can we show someone being shot on live television?”
“This isn’t a competition,” the higher-ups remind, but it’s hard to convince the Sports division of it. This is the Olympics, after all, where everyone’s bent on winning, and the rules are being written as they go.