A strikingly similar disaster occurred a few years after the resolution of the Iranian situation – the Lebanese hostage crisis, which describes a series of hostage situations that took place between the decade from 1982 and 1992.
Whereas the captors in the Iranian hostage crisis identified themselves as “followers of the Imam’s line,” a group dedicated to furthering the theocratic goals of the Ayatollah (who, as mentioned before, was the foremost religious and political leader in Iran at the time)1, the hostage takers in the Lebanon hostage crisis came from Hezbollah, a Shiite group with similar militant and political goals 2. Hence, both hostage crises were carried out by people with clear ties to radical Shiite Muslim groups and both were driven by religious and political motivations.
Further, the media covered both events quite extensively. In regards to the Iranian situation, for instance, the New York Times published an article about the event for all but two of the first 171 days. 3 Even into the latter half of the crisis, coverage was maintained at a daily pace – for instance, ABC’s successful Nightline program was born from the Iranian hostage crisis when the producers of that channel, seeking to compete against NBC’s own The Tonight Show, decided to create a program that would revolve entirely around the situation in Iran. Initially, the show was called The Iran Crisis – America Held Hostage: Day “#” (where “#” was replaced with the duration of the event). Later, only after the crisis had been resolved did the program adopt its now-famous moniker, Nightline.4
For instance, this clip is from ABC coverage of the start of the crisis.
This is a shot of news coverage from day 26.
Though there is less evidence to explicitly show the same for the Lebanese situation (since it spanned such a long length of time), it nonetheless received great attention from the media all the same as evidenced through the sheer amount of newspaper coverage it received (for instance, a ProQuest search of the key phrase “Lebanon hostage crisis” yields over 5000 results)6
- Gwertzman, B. (1981, January 18). Arbitrary Dates, Hard Cash and Islamic Fervor. The New York Times. pp. E2. Retrieved April 7 2014 from Proquest newspaper archives. ↩
- Kipper, J. (1985, July 19). Lessons of the Hostage Crisis. The New York Times. pp. A27. Retrieved April 7 2014 from Proquest newspaper archives. ↩
- Nacos, Brigitte L. (1994). Terrorism and the Media. New York, New York: Columbia University Press. ↩
- http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/fullpage?id=8984599. ↩
- http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/iran-crisis-america-held-hostage-9049607. ↩
- http://search.proquest.com/cv_659841/advanced?accountid=13314. ↩