On September 5, 1972, the Palestinian group Black September began its attack on Munich's Olympic Village. By the time the siege ended, 11 Israeli athletes had been murdered; five terrorists were killed, and one German police officer died.
Movies have taken note. In 1999, One Day in September won an Oscar for best documentary. In 2005, Steven Spielberg released Munich, which dealt with fallout from the attack.
Now comes September 5, a movie focused on how ABC covered an event that presented a real-time challenge for a crew that was ready to cover Olympic competition, not a gripping international news event with life-and-death stakes.
The strength of Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum's approach rests on the recognition that those covering the Olympics were presented with logistical and ethical challenges for which they had no real preparation.
How would an exhausted crew handle the first live TV broadcast of act of terror? Might such coverage jeopardize the hostages? What standards of confirmation would be employed to ensure the accuracy of ABC's reporting?
At one point during the 15-hour broadcast, the crew received a report that the hostages were safe. ABC broadcast the news and later aired a correction. The report was false.
The incident raises a key issue about journalism conducted on the fly: the conflict between the pressure to be first and the responsibility to be right.
ABC sports chief, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), fought to keep the story away from ABC's news division. He thought his crew was up to the task. John Magaro portrays Geoff Mason, the producer who found himself directing ABC's coverage; it was Mason's first day on the job.
Leonie Benesch plays Marianne Gebhardt, a German crew member who became invaluable because none of the others spoke German. Ben Chaplin plays Marvin Bader, the executive in charge of Olympic operations.
While tensions ripple through the control room, Arledge finds himself jockeying for satellite time. As questions about competition arise, Arledge must decide whether to give ABC's live feed to CBS when that network takes control of the satellite, which was being shared.
Looking back on it, the events of September 5 seem more significant than the coverage, but for millions around the world, Munich became inseparable from what they saw on TV. Live coverage already had insinuated itself into news, but Munich ratified it, leaving us with a question we still haven't answered: How much do we need to see when the worst things happen? And who decides?
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