Austrian director Tim Fehlbaum’s Oscar-nominated thriller September 5 raises the question of what “history” means. This dramatized account of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, where the Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September took members of the Israeli athletic team hostage in a siege that ended with eleven of them killed, focuses on how those events were broadcast by the ABC news network. It’s a meta subject, so Fehlbaum goes beyond atrocities of the past to carefully detail the media’s version of the past.
The word “history,” originating from the Greek term “inquiry,” means that September 5 inquires into the behavior and ethics behind the media presentation of that terrorist attack and its future significance for TV news.
Fehlbaum re-creates the ’70s as a foggy memory. Cinematographer Markus Förderer chooses a low light level for the behind-the-scenes workings of ABC’s American crew — control-room producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), ABC Sports operations chief Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), and the president of ABC Sports, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard). The film’s dark look is a realist artifice (imagine a poor TV broadcast of Dog Day Afternoon) that suggests we never see the past clearly. That’s Fehlbaum’s inadvertent insight into the journalistic failures of contemporary media, another institution that has lost the public’s confidence.
Launching from the legendary motto of ABC Sports broadcasts (“The thrill of victory / The agony of defeat”), September 5 takes an ironic approach to its story — back when TV news, sports, and entertainment kept strict divisions. The Munich tragedy marked a turning point in TV media, boosting Arledge, who afterward became the head of ABC News (from 1977 to 1998) and competed with NBC and CBS. The result was the blurring of news, sports, and entertainment that has forever ruined TV journalism.
September 5 reenacts that revolutionary moment as a contest of wills among grunt workers and executives. For the Americans working in Germany, the industry chain of command conflicted with cultural politics — Americans held parochial views about their post–World War II national superiority.
The terrorist threat gives ABC anxiety about getting the story right (it doesn’t at first, because it relies on “official government” sources). But the film’s most dramatic tension comes from business politics rather than the international crisis. The power games between the self-righteous Bader, the harried Mason, and the self-important executive Arledge are shown with actorly authenticity, especially Magaro’s Mason and Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) as the control room’s lone German, a woman who takes on a crucial role as the network’s interpreter.
Consider that there was only a single Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Fehlbaum and Moritz Binder; this contrasts with the many self-congratulatory TV-industry plaudits (29 Emmys according to Variety) won by ABC for its Munich coverage. That Fehlbaum’s conscientiousness has not been comparably endorsed proves the lack of scruples in contemporary media. Fehlbaum (and his producer Sean Penn) might have won great acclaim had they emphasized the on-camera “talent” — ABC news anchor Peter Jennings and sports anchor Jim McKay. Both men appear via the intercut archival footage from ABC’s Wide World of Sports in which McKay sorrowfully announced the hostage result: “They’re all gone now.”
September 5 is paced like a quasi-thriller, sometimes as swiftly as Irvin Kershner’s superb TV movie Raid on Entebbe, about an Israeli rescue mission in Idi Amin’s Uganda. But September 5 is essentially an analysis of the network hierarchies hiding within today’s political journalism. This isn’t the great movie the Olympic tragedy demands; that remains Spielberg’s Munich (2005). But September 5 is good enough to spark our curiosity about the meta aspect of TV news.
We should demand an inquiry into how media present other political events. Will we ever get an honest, behind-the-scenes movie about the January 6 show trials? September 5 details the network turnabout that eventually led to Democrat politicians hiring former ABC News producer James Goldston in 2022 to take on Arledge’s legacy and then arrange and fabricate the J6 Select Committee hearings for primetime consumption. That TV miniseries was a Millennial version of the news-sports-entertainment hodgepodge that began with the ABC network’s presentation of September 5.
Since then, network TV journalism has been inseparable from Fake News.