The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport

Dec. 7, as most members of the so-called “greatest generation” know, is the day that Franklin Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, belatedly drawing America into World War II. Similarly, most Americans, even those too young to have seen the Twin Towers collapse or smelled the stench of burning metal and flesh, know that Islamic terrorists changed history on Sept. 11 by killing over 3,000 people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within Israel and for Jews everywhere, Oct. 7 will long be remembered as the day that Hamas and other Palestinian enthusiasts slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 people hostage in coordinated incursions from Gaza.

What about Sept. 5? That date rings few memory bells, even for Americans who were able to watch television or follow the news in the fall of 1972. Some may dimly recall that on that day eight Palestinian terrorists from the militant Black September group infiltrated the Summer Olympics in Munich, killing two members of Israel’s national athletic team and taking nine others hostage. On Sept. 5, terrorism itself became a spectator sport.

That terrible event has now been rescued from obscurity by Tim Fehlbaum, the Swiss director and cowriter (with Moritz Binder and Alex David) whose film about ABC’s coverage of the attack more than deserves its sole Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Fehlbaum’s September 5 is a claustrophobic newsroom thriller. The film compresses the 22-hour-long ordeal into a taut, gripping 94 minutes. It not only chronicles an early terrorist milestone, but also explores with skill and subtlety the strengths and failures of broadcast journalism, the still evolving ethics of TV news, and the beginning of a new, harsher era of mass media.

As the film tells us, Sept. 5 was the first time that an act of terrorism was broadcast live around the world. Some 900 million people watched it unfold on TV, a quarter billion more people than those who saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon three years earlier.

Perhaps the film touched me so deeply because as an aspiring journalist and Olympics addict in college, I was glued to my TV set for the games, the first to be covered live thanks to the invention of satellite technology. Or perhaps it resonated because as a journalist who has focused on terrorism and mass mayhem for much of my career, the film brilliantly recreates the challenges and the ethical quandaries that continue to plague reporters who cover terror—or politics, for that matter. For journalism, as lead actor John Magaro told the London Times, is “one of the few careers where you can get a promotion when people die.”

September 5 is not a sprawling epic about the attack itself, the roots of Palestinian terror, or the morality of Israel’s deterrence cum revenge—as Steven Spielberg attempted in 2005 in his ambitious, but ultimately unconvincing Munich. Nor is it an effort to portray journalists as noble warriors for truth and justice, like Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s characters in All the President’s Men. The late director Alan Pakula’s homage to journalism was a stretch even in 1976, when the film was made and journalists were still widely admired. Today, it would probably be greeted with snickering disbelief.

Instead, Fehlbaum takes us inside ABC’s cramped, smoke-filled control room near the Olympic village in Munich to portray the frenetic nature of a newsroom during a crisis and the intense pressure on newsmen—and they were almost all men back then. What gives the film its power and its poignancy is its honest portrayal of journalists as ordinary people forced to make what were literally life-and-death decisions for those on both sides of the lens in split seconds with little time to reflect on those decisions, or request a do-over. Some of those calls inevitably came to be seen as wrong. But life permits no second takes.

The film opens in ABC’s control room in Munich’s media village with a sense of fatigue. The head of ABC sports, Roone Arledge, (Peter Sarsgaard, TV’s Presumed Innocent) has left a relatively inexperienced sports producer, Geoffrey Mason, (the impeccable John Magaro) in charge of the control booth while most of the team catches up on sleep. Nothing much is expected to happen. The production team has been debating whether to broadcast a package about Holocaust remembrance—the Israeli team’s visit to a memorial at the Dachau concentration camp. This is one of several references to the wounds of World War II and the Holocaust, which partly explains why Germany was so proud to be hosting the ’72 Olympics to atone for its last catastrophic Berlin games in 1936. The ABC sports team has just cycled through a shift change after broadcasting early-morning competitions in swimming, boxing, and volleyball, when Mason thinks he hears gunfire.

The drama races on from that moment, with hand-held cameras focused tightly on Mason and his production team as they struggle for time on the satellite and the live footage to put on it. It’s hard to remember that there were no cellphones then, no way to reach reporters and team members who were sleeping or doing laps in the hotel pool, or off hiking in the Alps. There were no live cameras in a reporter’s pocket. Camera film was a physical medium that took 20 minutes to develop. But the need for risk-taking, ingenuity and the importance of luck—of being at the right place at the right time—remain unchanged.

Once it becomes clear that a terror attack involving Israeli hostages is underway, ingenuity prevails. A team member is dressed as an athlete and a phony ID is forged to sneak him into the village 100 yards away to smuggle out canisters of film taped to his waist. The 16-millimeter film must be processed on the fly as interviews are being broadcast. Cinematographer Markus Förderer captures the primitive TV technology in his tightly shot images—the control booth’s illuminated buttons, ancient microphones, rotary dial phones, dinosaur-size studio cameras, the bluish tinge of fluorescent lighting, and overflowing ashtrays—a far cry from today’s slick studios and instant, computer-assisted images.

Mistakes are made—large and small. Mason sends junior female crewmember Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch of The Teacher’s Lounge) out for coffee. (Gebhardt is a composite character of several German women who were recruited that day as translators.) But when German radio broadcasts news about the hostages, Mason, who speaks no German, is at a loss. Congratulations, a colleague berates him: The only person on the team who can understand what’s being said has just been dispatched for coffee. And without excusing German law enforcement’s utter incompetence (their rescue effort killed not only the terrorists but five of the 11 Israelis hostages and a West German police officer), Gebhardt explains that the would-be rescuers are just “local cops doing things they have never done before.” Germany had no SWAT teams back then.

Before the ’72 Olympics, almost no one grasped what the Palestinian attackers obviously understood: that terrorism would trump sports as the show the world wanted to see. And for the first time, the whole world was watching Palestinian brutality unfold on camera and in real time.

As Geoff Mason scrambles to get the story, Roone Arledge, who went on to head ABC News, must fight to keep it. Turf wars are inevitable in any news organization, but particularly during an unprecedented breaking story when career-making reputations as well as ratings are at stake. Arledge’s colleagues in New York think they should be in charge. “You’re sports,” they rebuke him. “You’re in way over your head.” But in TV, access to live footage trumps all, as Arledge knows. “We’re the only people capable of covering this live,” he tells New York. He trusts his team to get the story over reporters in a newsroom thousands of miles away. “This is our story,” he says, “and we’re keeping it.”

The superb cast flawlessly portrays the sports journalists who rise to the occasion, and sometimes far above it. A young Peter Jennings is fleetingly portrayed by Benjamin Walker, but his actual archive voice is interspliced with his on-camera dramatized version. He knows much about the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict, as his narration shows. The archival footage of famed sports anchor Jim McKay is particularly moving, his professionalism under enormous pressure memorable. While the film eschews actual depictions of violence, the inclusion of the photo of the masked Palestinian overlooking the hostages’ balcony is a powerful reminder of why some images do become iconic.

Much of the film’s exploration of journalism’s ethical issues arises from Mason’s interactions with key coworkers. Operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a Jewish New Yorker whose family was victimized by the Holocaust, worries about how ABC is covering the attack. Is the media just documenting the moment in history, or is it an active player? Is its coverage actually helping the terrorists? “If they shoot someone on live TV, whose story is that?” Bader asks Mason. “Is it ours, or is it theirs?”

“We follow the story,” Arledge orders.

“It’s not OK if we made it worse,” Mason asserts.

The team debate what to call the attackers. Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem), a French Algerian Arab, is uncomfortable with the term “terrorists,” but it quickly prevails, and has endured.

Mason comes to understand the impact of his team’s role when his cameras film German police encircling the building and snipers taking up positions in preparation for an attack on the apartment where the Israelis are being held. When he sees TV lights shining in the apartment, he realizes that the terrorists are tuning into ABC and that his cameras have given away the German police’s plan. “Are they seeing what we’re seeing?” he asks. The answer becomes painfully clear when the police are forced to call off their initial rescue effort and then raid his studio, demanding that ABC’s cameras be turned off.

The film also highlights the constant, enduring journalistic tension between trying to get the story first versus getting it right. One of the film’s pivotal moments is Mason’s decision to rebroadcast an unverified report on German radio that the police have rescued all the hostages, only to have to correct that story hours later. “They’re all gone,” the archival Jim McKay laments.

Although viewers may know that the attack ends tragically, we, like Mason and his team, keep hoping for a life-affirming Hollywood ending. It’s partly what prompts Mason to broadcast the initial false report that the hostages are safe—absent a second, independent confirmation. Journalists and viewers alike want the Israeli athletes to survive. 

The film was in post-production when Oct. 7 took place. Fehlbaum has said in interviews that no one associated with the film predicted that it would be released as Israel was reeling from this even more horrifying attack. But the Hamas terrorists had clearly absorbed the lessons of Sept. 5. They wanted their slaughter to be seen, virtually live, and celebrated. In fact, much of what we know about the massacre and abductions that day initially came from what the attackers themselves recorded, broadcast, and boasted about on their own social media. As such, a direct line can be drawn between the 1972 Munich Olympics, when ABC covered the terrorists, and Oct. 7, when the terrorists dispensed with their media intermediaries and recorded the slaughter themselves. Both generations of terrorists were performing for the camera. And as Fehlbaum clearly knows, viewers can’t look away.