I was particularly interested by newspaper coverage, not only because I’ve always been attracted to journalism as a hobby, but also because newspaper articles, in theory, receive a great amount of revisions and edits before publication to ensure that journalistic integrity is upheld;¹ such integrity is supposed to limit the inclusion of personal opinions into the text of the articles themselves. Hence, shifts in newspaper portrayals of events would be ostensibly significant in reflecting a greater overall shift in a society’s understanding of that event. In particular, I decided to focus on the New York Times since it was (and continues to be) one of the most reputable news outlets available.

At first, the newspaper coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis was cautious in its portrayal of the hostage takers, calling them mostly students or captors. As the crisis dragged on, though, I found that the newspaper began to more strongly implicate the ethno-religious, radical Muslim, fundamentalist Islamic characterizations of the perpetrators. The aforementioned phrases, as well as derivatives thereof, became much more commonplace in the articles covering the event, and to artfully reflect this, I compiled some of the more dramatic phrases into a text collage, presented below. It is comprised entirely of unmodified snippets taken directly from the newspaper articles themselves.

Text collage of phrases from American newspaper articles regarding the Iranian captors

When the Lebanon hostage crisis arose, though, articles covering the events attributed the cause to Muslims and Islamic extremists from the onset. The very first hostage, American citizen David Dodge, was reported to have been captured by “four gunmen” who were “Moslem (sp.) militiamen;” ². Later abductions, such as those involving American citizens Terry Anderson and Joseph Cicippio, were similarly described as being conducted by “Shiite Muslim fundamentalists.”³. Even after all American hostages had been released, the Times continued to report on the captivity of others – while “the ordeal is over for Americans held hostage by fanaticism, it [still] continues with no end in sight.” ⁴. Thus, throughout the duration of the entire crisis, New York Times articles continued to highlight this facet of the perpetrators’ identities.

Hence, I came to the conclusion that, sometime in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, newspaper articles (and, ostensibly, public opinion as well) exhibited a shift characterized by greater fear of radical Islam as a threat to the West; further, I argued that this shift carried beyond Iranian situation in the form a longer-lasting media representational frame (a “media frame” is a phenomenon whereby the portrayal of present events is impacted by understandings of similar past occurrences). Such framing can help explain why newspaper articles were so quick to identify the ethno-religious trait of the perpetrators in the later Lebanon crisis.⁵

From this train of thought, I posited that analysis of the Iranian and Lebanese hostage situations could help develop the existing theories of media framing, particularly in regards to the development and rise of media frames in the first place. As indicated above, the first newspaper articles to cover the Iranian hostage crisis did not explicitly blame Islamic radicals; it was only later that they came to do so. Thus, there seems to be a lag between the conception of an event and the formation of a frame to fit that event.