Reuters Editors

The challenges for media, 30 years after my hostage ordeal

Thirty years ago this Wednesday, I was sitting, chain smoking, in the basement of a children’s needlework school in Kensington, London. It was a few doors away from the Iranian Embassy, which for six days had been under siege as six Iranian dissidents held two dozen hostages captive. Five days earlier, on April 30th, I had been released from the embassy after suffering what the hostage-takers, and myself, thought was a heart attack, though it was probably self-induced through terror and self survival.

The needlework school had another function that day – it was the HQ for the police and  military preparing to break the siege. I had been summoned there to assist in the hostage negotiations, though as I arrived the Iranians dumped one dead hostage onto the street. They had shot him in the head and threatened to shoot another within the hour.

Within minutes members of Britain’s Special Air Services (SAS) were given orders to storm the embassy and break the siege. They did so in 43 minutes, rescuing all but one of the hostages and shooting dead five of the six dissidents. The sixth later stood trial at the Old Bailey and was jailed for life.

It was history in the making. The SAS’s finest hour. All covered live on television (though, remarkably, the interruption of regular programming – a John Wayne western on one channel, the final of a snooker contest on the other – was considered a bold move on the part of the programmers, subject to much criticism from viewers in the days after.)

Three weeks later, on June 1st, 1980, CNN was launched and a revolution in continuous news began. As a former hostage, and a newsman for more than 40 years, I am conflicted.

How would the modern-day media cover a siege such as the 1980 one?  How would the relentless, frequently breathless and opinionated media of 2010 report on the delicate, terrifying negotiations that went on 30 years ago this week?

There was at least one television set inside the Iranian embassy, though for some reason it was not working. There was a radio – and the hostages and their captors sat around it like attentive children, sobbing, laughing and occasionally arguing as broadcasts were made. The slightest error or nuanced report was a cause for distress.

Blogging Iran: Politics and Poetry

Blogging is big in Iran. We already knew that from Technorati statistics on the prevalence of Farsi language blogs on the Web. But now comes a fascinating insight into what all those bloggers are blogging about.

This is what the Iranian blogosphere looks like, according to John Kelly – a Columbia University academic who isn’t joking when he tells audiences he thinks there isn’t a human phenomenon that can’t be reduced to a series of coloured dots.

Each dot represents a blog , and the bigger the dot the greater the number of links being made to that blog.

I’m surprised by the size of the conservative politics blogosphere and of the neighbouring religious blogosphere, which are jointly around the same size as the secular and reformist blogospheres.

Most surprising, however, is the equally large poetry blogosphere in the upper left hand quadrant.

John previewed this recently published research at the Media:Republic gathering in Los Angeles last month. And it was the size of the poetry blogosphere that got participants talking — I think most of the American and British participants felt slightly awed that Iranians were using the Web to create art on such a scale.