None Dare Call It a Hostage Crisis
During the 1980 presidential election season, many Americans tuned in to ABC’s Nightline, where host Ted Koppel began each night’s program announcing “Day ____” of the Iranian hostage crisis. America was “held hostage.” On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian “students” seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage until Jan. 20, 1981, inauguration day for the new American president Ronald Reagan. ABC, CBS, and NBC frequently led off their 6 p.m. news programs with updates on the hostage crisis. The Iranians held those Americans as hostages for 444 days, despite a feeble and unsuccessful attempt by the Carter administration to rescue them. The hostage crisis was one of several reasons why Ronald Reagan, who was not the media’s favorite candidate, won a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, at least 120 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, including seven American citizens. The American Jewish Committee reports that 43 Americans were killed by Hamas in the initial days and weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks. Yet, there is no “hostage crisis” reported by the mainstream media on a daily basis, as in 1979–1980. In a few weeks, it will be “Day 365” of captivity for those Americans (and the many more Israelis), but ABC, CBS, and NBC are not calling this an “American hostage crisis,” and are not reporting on it daily as they did in the lead-up to the 1980 election. At most, if the networks use the word “crisis,” it is an “Israeli hostage crisis,” not an American one. This allows the media to criticize and undermine the Netanyahu government in Israel without doing any damage to the Biden–Harris administration. The mainstream media, it seems, has learned its lesson from 1979–1980. Then, they didn’t want Jimmy Carter to lose but their coverage of the hostage crisis contributed to his defeat. Now, they don’t want Donald Trump to win, so they refrain from reminding Americans that 43 of their fellow citizens were killed by Hamas and seven more have been held hostage for nearly a year. Media bias is not just how you report the “news,” but what you decide to report.
Years after Iran released the 52 American embassy hostages, many in the media claimed that Reagan made a deal with Iran to postpone their release until he took office. Those claims were debunked by William Inboden and Joseph Ledford in a compelling essay in War on the Rocks. They were further debunked by the renowned strategist Edward Luttwak, a member of Reagan’s transition team, who revealed in an interview that Iran released the hostages because Iranian leaders “were told in a one-way communication” that when Reagan is inaugurated as president he will shortly thereafter “order the bombardment of an Iranian city,” and “there will be no negotiations” unless the hostages are immediately freed.
Middle East hostages, of course, became big news again in the mid-1980s during the so-called “Iran-Contra scandal,” which the media fueled on a daily basis in an attempt to bring down the Reagan administration for “illegally” trading arms for hostages. Democrats in Congress and their media allies tried a replay of Watergate, with special investigating committees and the appointment of independent counsel Lawrence Walsh who did his best to get Reagan, but failed. Walsh, to his everlasting discredit, did manage to indict former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and released the indictment on the Friday before the 1992 presidential election, thereby helping to elect Democrat Bill Clinton. It was Walsh’s version of an “October surprise,” that may have swung the election to Clinton.
So the mainstream media is once again playing politics with the lives of American hostages by putting no pressure on the Biden–Harris administration to get the hostages freed. They don’t want a repeat of 1980, where they unwittingly helped elect Ronald Reagan. The great threat to America, they believe, is not Iran or Hamas — it is Donald Trump.
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