If the practice of taking Western hostages, then passing on videos of them to the press (perhaps taking Western hostages in order to pass on such videos) has essentially ended in Iraq, there is no reason to believe the tactic will not be used again. It is well worth examining the tactic and its implications to take note of lessons learned, because there is every reason to believe it will be coming around again soon enough.[1] Indeed, asking why the various insurgent groups in Iraq stopped using Western hostages to gain media attention is a reasonable place for analysis to begin. Surely any number of factors was at play, but researchers should be asking whether one was that when networks stopped playing the tapes, taking Westerners hostage stopped being a way to gain access to the vast American audience.
It is interesting that toward the end of the use of the hostages as part of a media strategy, some of the most prominent victims were journalists.[2] A cynic might wonder whether the very real risk to the hostage attendant to giving these groups the amount and degree of air play they no doubt would have wanted was suddenly brought home in a way it had not been before. Certainly it is the case that the families of reporter-hostages were left alone and accorded a degree of respect that was never the case for the families of any other hostage, inevitably convinced, one way or the other, to appear on a couch on the Today Show and answer insipid questions about how they "felt" and "how hard" this must be for their family until the requisite tears appeared. Of course, once a question elicited tears, it was that question that would then be replayed over and over again on the cable networks, all day long.[3]
At a minimum, whether or not there is a relationship between the end of the use of hostages as a media
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- ↑ It is also important to consider the possibility that there will be a revisioning of older forms of hostage taking for the purpose of gaining media attention given the amount of coverage given the attacks on the Mumbai hotels. See Cori E. Dauber, "Mumbai Memo," unpublished manuscript, Carlisle, PA, November 28, 2008.
- ↑ One of the last Westerners taken hostage, for example, was Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor when she was kidnapped on January 7, 2006, and held for 82 days before being released.
- ↑ Carroll's family appeared when they had a prepared statement they wished to read—and when they did so, they were essentially given the air time they wanted, and briefly asked questions that directly fed the family's goals; for example, of using CNN as a platform for sending a message directly to the kidnappers. See "An Interview with Jill Carroll’s Mother," CNN American Morning, January 19, 2006, available from Lexis-Nexis Academic, www.lexisnexis.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T5457678761&format=GNBFI&sort=BOOLEAN&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T5457678764&cisb=22_T5457678763&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=271063&docNo=10. Some aspects of the media were absent; for example, no satellite trucks were camped out on their lawn. The distinction in the way they were treated, compared to the way the families of random kidnap victims (be they truck drivers, soldiers, or civilian contractors) were treated, was so stark as to be unavoidable.
