September 5, the story of ABC Sports’ coverage of a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is as much about journalism as it is about the murders of Israel coaches and athletes half a century ago.
“I hope you see its relevance to what’s going on today in terms of the way that we consume our news, and who gets to tell the story,” Peter Sarsgaard, who plays ABC executive Roone Arledge in the film, said before a screening of it at the Newport Beach Film Festival on Wednesday.
The film, co-written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum, offers a new take on a story that has been previously told in the 1999 documentary One Day in September and in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 drama Munich: The killing of Israeli athletes and coaches who were targeted by Palestinian militants at the 1972 Olympic Games.
September 5 shows ABC’s sports team refusing to cede the story to the news division, and making many bad journalistic judgment calls along the way. At one point, a translator with no news experience passes along a false rumor that is soon reported to nearly a billion viewers.
It isn’t hard to see a parallel with our modern age, in which anyone can claim to be a reporter, and share anything, whether true or not. Algorithms routinely elevate stories based on engagement, not accuracy. Entertainment outlets (hi!) routinely wander into coverage of serious issues.
The film asks what happens when entertainment merges with news — and when the media’s desire to break news dovetails perfectly with terrorists’ plans to manipulate the public. What do you do when someone wants you to broadcast an execution, live?
Or, for that matter, when proven liars want you to cover them with no fact-checking?
Does the public always have a right to see the live feed? And if the press won’t show it, won’t some narcissist with a big social media following? Who gets to tell what story? Can you put toothpaste back in the tube?
In one of the film’s most riveting sections, ABC accidentally becomes part of the story when it broadcasts police movements against the terrorists — sparking fears that the terrorists might watch the coverage and prepare a counterstrike.
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The sequence is based on fact. Arledge wrote in his memoir, Roone, that many wondered if the terrorists might “watch on television everything that was going on around them. I’d repeatedly asked that question myself and been reassured that they couldn’t.”
In the end, he wrote, ABC agreed to cut a feed to Europe, to make sure the terrorists weren’t watching.
The sequence in the film foreshadows the way the media has become part of seemingly every story. People in the public eye try to spin news coverage, and news outlets and viewers are well aware of it. In an endless cycle of skepticism, the media covers responses to media coverage.
How Accurate Is September 5?
In a metaphor for our uncertain age, September 5, a film condemning sloppy and inaccurate reporting, itself contains elements that are open to dispute.
While the film gets many details right, it condenses others to keep the focus on ABC Sports. In the film, for example, ABC rushes to broadcast a major inaccuracy about the outcome of a hostage crisis, adding the timid hedge, “as we’re hearing.”
Arledge wrote in his memoir that the news outlet Reuters issued the erroneous report, while he “decided to wait for confirmation. Better right than first.” Sportscaster Jim McKay, who figures prominently in September 5, has also said ABC Sports never aired the erroneous report. (Reps for ABC and Paramount did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how the events are portrayed in the film.)
Movies, of course, aren’t held to the same standards of accuracy as journalism, and routinely condense characters and timelines to make their points. September 5 turns ABC Sports into a metaphorical stand-in for journalism in general.
“To me, it’s one of the most important jobs, and also one of the jobs that’s performed poorly more often than not,” Sarsgaard said at a career retrospective before the screening.
When journalism is done well, he explained, “I have an enormous amount of respect for it.”
Peter Sarsgaard in Defense of Boring News
Sarsgaard received the festival’s Film Performance of the Year Award for September 5, which has a close thematic connection with another of the actor’s films, 2003’s Shattered Glass.
In Shattered Glass, Hayden Christensen played real-life fabulist Stephen Glass, and Sarsgaard played his beleaguered editor, Charles Lane, who is rigorous about facts but is outshined by the fun, exciting — and dishonest — Glass.
“Sometimes the truth is boring,” Sarsgaard said. “I think that’s something that we have to get used to. … We have to have everything be entertaining, including our news, and that makes it not truthful.”
But September 5 is anything but boring. It turns high-minded journalistic debate into a crackerjack thriller, packed with heroes and villains. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Then or now.
September 5 arrives in theaters November 27 from Paramount.
Main image: September 5. Paramount.