Are the media helping the hostage takers?

By Peter Preston - Former editor of the Guardian.

The taking of hostages, such as Ken Bigley in Iraq, has prompted debate on the media's role and responsibilities in covering such events. Does publicity help or hinder their plight? Was Margaret Thatcher right to decry the 'oxygen of publicity'? The dilemma is beginning to haunt editors everywhere. How do you deal with this wave of hostage taking from Russia to Iraq? How do you cover something where, time and again, your coverage is part of the reason why the hostages were taken in the first place?

Perhaps the media has been a little slow off the mark here, blinded by a certain arrogance. We couldn't believe that Chechen revolutionaries or Al-Qaeda terrorists with beards and kaftans could be sophisticated spin doctors, too - let alone that it was us they were spinning.

But that is the truth of it. The Chechens who stormed that school in Beslan and shot their own videos inside it expected to see TV cameras poking 24 hours a day from surrounding buildings. That was one of the points of their brutal exercise. The most vicious of the Iraqi groups who take hostages like Kenneth Bigley aren't after ransom money: they want their deeds on the internet and then on front pages and television screens everywhere. It boosts their power in the Arab world. It shakes western public opinion. It's the name of their game.

What do we - those editors who have come to realise the ploy and our readers and listeners - do about that? Some groups in Iraq are extortionists, not zealots; some bargains are best made in the open.

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Another infernal dilemma. Many readers or listeners have a simple answer, the one Mrs Thatcher gave long ago when she decried the 'oxygen of publicity'. Simply: don't show the hostages or their masked captors, don't publicise the demands or chart the progress, don't mention the beheadings or the agonies of their families. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. Enforce blanket silence and (perhaps) the hostage takers will go away.

But, like all simple answers, this one doesn't quite work. It doesn't work for the two smiling Italian hostages now released from captivity and safe home. It hasn't been the way to get two French journalists back to freedom - or many more hostages before them.

Some groups in Iraq are extortionists, not zealots; some bargains are best made in the open. How, though, do you know who you're dealing with until some way down the line? News isn't a water tap, to be switched off and on arbitrarily.

Readers and listeners aren't stooges, to be informed and then ignored. In a free society, moreover, I think that citizens who have the profound ill luck to be taken hostage deserve more than being left to die in silence, to join the ranks of the disappeared. That is us using them as pawns; and we ought to be better than that.

No: the only way is the hard way. It means thought and reflection from editors, reporters and listeners alike. It means seeing, hour by hour, the nature of the manipulation and explaining the probabilities. The injunction, at the last, is to tell the whole story, the full truth. And if sickening spin is part of that story, to make sure that we all understand that, too. The hostages have to live, terrified, in the dark. We have to live in the light.

BBC NEWS REPORT.