Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2013). The Management of Visibility: Media Coverage of Kidnapping and...

This is a pre-print version. The final version of this article was published in:

Media, Culture & Society, 2013, Vol. 35, No.7, pp. 791–808.

doi: 10.1177/0163443713495075

The Management of Visibility:

Media Coverage of Kidnapping and Captivity Cases around the World

Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt

Department of Communication & Journalism

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

[email protected]

Abstract

This article examines the journalistic practices associated with the management of

visibility of kidnapping and captivity stories, based on a comparative study of the

media coverage of seven cases of Colombian, French, Israeli, and US citizens who

were taken captive in the first decade of the 21st century. Differences in the general

level of visibility given to these stories are identified and explained, followed by an

analysis of three patterns of high visibility management across time, termed

“sustained visibility”, “delayed visibility” and “cyclical visibility”. Emerging from

the analysis is the complex interplay between hyper-visibility and invisibility in

journalistic practices, as well as the notion of elastic newsworthiness, according to

which news criteria are not only shaping patterns of visibility but are also being

shaped by them.

mailto:[email protected]

The Management of Visibility 2

The Management of Visibility:

Media Coverage of Kidnapping and Captivity Cases around the World

Publicity and visibility, described by Roger Silverstone as the oxygen which sustains public life

in the ‘mediapolis’ of the twenty first century (Silverstone, 2007), have long been vital elements

of both democratic theory (e.g., Bentham, 1994/1791; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996) and

identity politics (e.g., Gross, 2001; Hobson, 2003). The news media, in their watchdog capacity

and their role in facilitating public deliberation, are viewed as main organs of publicity in its

normative-democratic sense (Splichal, 2002). As signifying agents (Hall, 1980) and agenda

setters (McCombs, 2005), they constitute a central battleground for visibility struggles of

different groups, movements and individuals, or in John Thompson’s words, ‘the key arena in

which the struggle over symbolic power is played out’ (Thompson, 2000: 105).

Visibility, however, can be a double-edged sword, and the management of visibility has

thus become a primary challenge for political actors, social movements and other individuals and

organizations that seek to be either seen and heard, or remain in the dark (Thompson, 2000,

2005). This article examines, from a comparative perspective, the ways in which the news media

not only serve as the battleground of visibility struggles or the object of manipulations involved

in the management of visibility, but also play an active role in the visibility management of at

least some stories. This role, as shown here, is shaped by a complex set of commitments, values,

journalistic traditions, discursive strategies, and newspapers’ own visibility struggles. It is also

suggested that managing the level of visibility of particular news stories is done through

mechanisms of ‘elastic newsworthiness,’ in which news criteria are molded and refashioned to

maintain a certain level of visibility for the story at a given point in time.

This article focuses on stories of kidnapping and captivity, which present complex

dilemmas and challenges to the news media in relation to visibility management. Drawing on a


comparative study of the media coverage of seven cases of political kidnapping in the first

decade of the twenty-first century, I examine the divergent ways in which the news media

address the question of how much and what sort of visibility to give to particular news stories. I

identify and explain differences in general levels of visibility accorded to the seven cases by

different news outlets in France, Israel, Colombia and the U.S., and I analyze several patterns of

high visibility management, while focusing on the journalistic practices associated with these

patterns and the interplay between visibility and invisibility in the coverage.

The Tensions and Dimensions of Publicity and Visibility

Publicity, in its normative-political context, has long been conceptualized as vital to democracy

and as a normative basis for freedom of the press (Splichal, 2002). At one level, it is

conceptualized as a means to monitor public officials and hold them in line (Bentham,

1994/1791: 581). As such, the notion of publicity is closely related to the watchdog role of the

news media and their function as ‘the Fourth Estate.’ At the same time, publicity is seen as an

important foundation of public deliberation, based on a requirement that governments adopt

‘only those policies for which officials and citizens give public reasons’ (Gutmann and

Thompson, 1996: 101). Within this framework, the news media should report on political

deliberations, facilitate deliberations among citizen by publicizing the relevant information, and

serve as a forum for ‘mediated deliberation’ (Page, 1996) on public issues.

From a cultural-critical perspective, visibility was explored in the context of identity

politics and power struggles surrounding the representation of individuals and groups. This line

of research suggests that quantitatively, the level of media visibility reflects and shapes real-

world hierarchies, and that qualitatively, visibility involves complex strategies and symbolic

forms, each with its promises and perils (e.g., Fiske, 1996; Gross, 2001, Hobson, 2003).

Questions regarding visibility and publicity have become particularly pertinent in the new


media environment, defined by Silverstone as a ‘space of appearance’ (2007: 25). According to

Thompson (2005: 49), the ‘new visibility’ that characterizes the contemporary media

environment is associated with the sheer quantity of information flow, the extensive

geographical spread of information, and the reduced ability to control the information and to

‘throw a veil of secrecy’ around politicians' activities. And yet, various actors in the social and

political world still attempt to control the flow of information and silence/downplay certain

stories, whereas other actors, who seek to make themselves seen and heard, are excluded from

the media sphere. In these conditions, struggles for visibility and attempts to manage visibility

have become central to the operation of various individuals and groups (Thompson, 2000, 2005).

This study examines the ways in which the different dimensions of visibility – the

normative-democratic dimensions on one side and the dimensions of symbolic power on the

other – work together in contexts where there are conditions, pressures and needs of secrecy and

invisibility. The first context concerns cases in which journalists face conflicting pressures and

commitments to both publicize and silence particular stories, events, opinions or information. In

stories of kidnapping and captivity, journalists commonly face pressures to keep these stories

high on the media agenda as a means of maintaining the issue on the public agenda and exerting

pressure on decision makers. These pressures emanate primarily from the captives’ families and

public campaigns for the captives’ release. Other forces that push towards high visibility include

both the dramatic/mythic value of kidnapping and captivity stories and the news media’s

responsibility to facilitate informed debate on this issue, which involves complex policy

decisions. At the same time, journalists also face pressures to withhold information regarding

kidnapping cases or even blackout such stories. Media coverage can raise the captive’s value as a

bargaining chip, undermine secret negotiations, or reveal information that would put the

captive’s life in greater risk. Other reasons for decreased visibility are based on the same


concerns that drive criticisms of the media coverage of terrorism, such as concerns over playing

into the hands of the kidnappers in their quest for publicity, or prohibiting rational deliberations

and decision-making processes by focusing on the emotional dimensions of these stories (cf.

Nacos, 1994).

Stories of kidnapping and captivity are also emblematic of a second type of interplay

between visibility and invisibility, concerning the ways in which the media give visibility to

issues and stories when information, visuals or visible developments are not available – that is,

when there are not enough conventional newsworthy developments to support the media interest

in the story. As stories in which the main protagonist is absent and in which actual developments

are either scarce or happen under a veil of secrecy, kidnapping and captivity cases present the

challenge of making the invisible visible.

Visibility and Newsworthiness

How do the news media handle the question of how much and what sort of visibility to give to

particular stories? One common answer to this question is that the level of visibility given to

particular stories is determined by the newsworthiness of the events and available information

associated with the story – that is, by how well they fit certain news values and criteria (see

Galtung & Ruge, 1965, for the foundational study on news criteria, and O’Neill & Harcup, 2009,

for a useful review of the topic). Within this framework, even if various players outside the

media field work to produce events and information that would serve their interests and receive

media visibility, the selection of news by the media is based on the degree to which these events

and information fit given news values. In other words, the assumption underlying much of the

research is that events in the world, real or manufactured by various social and political players,

need to pass a certain threshold in order to be defined as news. Within this framework, the level

of visibility given to a particular story is the sum of individual newsworthiness decisions.


However, as argued in this article, the process can also work the other way around.

According to this view, what drives the news coverage in certain cases is not solely the degree to

which events or information meet particular news criteria, but an interest in maintaining the story

in the news (or out of the news) at a given point in time, which in turn leads to molding

conventional standards of newsworthiness. Put differently, news criteria are not only shaping the

level of visibility of news stories but are also being shaped by them. I call this process ‘elastic

newsworthiness,’ referring to the flexible definition of what constitutes news, based on the need

to maintain a certain level of visibility for the story at a given point in time. Viewed from this

perspective, the level of visibility is not only the dependent ‘variable’ but also a determining

factor.

While it has not been defined in these terms, the idea of ‘elastic newsworthiness’ is not

entirely new. It was identified, for example, in news waves or media-hypes, which are

characterized by a self-reinforcing process of news selection, corresponding to the theme of the

hype (Kepplinger and Habermeier, 1995; Vasterman, 2005; Wolfsfeld, 2001). This process is

also more in tune with advocacy journalism or other interventionist models of journalism (cf.

Donsbach & Patterson, 2004; Hanitzsch, 2007; Waisobord, 2009), where particular agendas

determine what is considered news at different points in time. In addition, the notion of elastic

newsworthiness is closely tied to the view of news stories as serial narratives rather than

autonomous short stories (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2008), as well as to the unsettled nature of

many public events (Zelizer, 2010). Like the producers of series in the fictional realm, the

producers of news stories need to engage audiences in the unfolding narrative, while moving

them toward an anticipated closure (in the case of kidnapping and captivity stories – the return of

the captive). However, unlike producers of fictional series they cannot simply invent plot twists

that would fill the weekly or daily episodes and maintain continuity. The molding and


refashioning of news values thus serves as a mechanism for filling in voids in the coverage and

maintaining continuity for the story.

The idea of elastic newsworthiness is thus offered as a framework for integrating and

conceptualizing different types of news selection processes, where news criteria are molded to fit

various constraints and agendas. This article focuses on the ways in which elastic

newsworthiness serves as a mechanism for managing the level of visibility of stories of

kidnapping and captivity, with an emphasis on three visibility patterns in which mechanisms of

elastic newsworthiness are particularly pronounced: sustained visibility, delayed visibility, and

cyclical visibility.

Method

The study employed a multiple case study design (Stake, 2005; Yin, 2009), including seven

cases of Colombian, French, Israeli, and US citizens who were taken captive between 2002 and

2008 during the conflicts in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza. Listed according to the date

of abduction, these cases include: 1) Ingrid Betancourt, a former presidential candidate in

Colombia (kidnapped by the FARC in 2002 and released in a rescue operation in 2008); 2) Three

US military contractors – Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell (taken captive by the

FARC in 2003 and rescued together with Betancourt in 2008); 3) French journalists Christian

Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Geroges Malbrunot of Le Figaro (kidnapped in Iraq

in 2004 and released four months later in unknown circumstances); 4) French journalist Florence

Aubenas of the daily newspaper Libération (abducted in Iraq in 2005, two weeks after the release

of Chesnot and Malbrunot, and released after six months. As in the case of Chesnot &

Malbrunot, French officials denied that a ransom was paid); 5) Christian Science Monitor

reporter Jill Carroll (abducted in Iraq in 2006 and released after three months in unknown

circumstances); 6) Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006,


and released in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange deal); and 7) New York Times Journalist

David Rohde (kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008. He escaped after seven months).

In addition to selecting cases that provided me with rich opportunities to examine the

research questions, these seven cases were selected to produce an effective balance between

similarity and diversity of contexts (cf. Stake, 2005). All cases share four primary characteristics,

which create a common basis for comparison: they are all cases from the first decade of the

twenty first century; they all occurred in the context of armed political conflicts (rather than

conflicts within the family, purely criminal contexts, etc.); the nation-states to which the captives

belong are all democracies; and lastly, I only included cases in which the captives were not

killed. However, within this shared framework, there is high variability. On top of the differences

in national contexts, including important differences in the four countries' media systems and

journalistic cultures (see below), the case studies also differ in attributes related to identity

categories such as gender and position/profession, as well as attributes associated with the

captivity period (e.g., length of captivity and the way in which the captivity ended).

The primary data for the study were the coverage of the seven cases of kidnapping and

captivity in eleven leading newspapers in Colombia, France, Israel and the U.S., from the day of

the abduction to a year after the release (the exception was the case of Gilad Shalit, who had not

yet been released when the study was conducted. The study thus focused on the first 1500 days

of Shalit’s captivity, from June 25, 2006 to August 3, 2010). The eleven newspapers include: El

Tiempo in Colombia; Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération in France; Yedioth Ahronoth and

Ha’aretz in Israel; and The New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today

and the Christian Science Monitor in the U.S. The newspapers were selected based on

considerations combining circulation, influence, availability of archives, and special relations to

the cases. Thus, four of the newspapers were the employers of four of the captives: Libération of


Aubenas, Le Figaro of Malbrunot, The New York Times of Rohde, and the Monitor of Carroll.

Within the newspapers, the focus of this article is on the front-page coverage of the seven

cases. The front page constitutes not only the most visible part of the newspaper but also the

most strategic and calculated one (as manifested, for example, in daily, high-rank front-page

meetings). It is thus the site where we can see most clearly the processes, strategies and practices

of visibility management. In addition, the front pages are the most stable dimension for

comparison across newspapers. The relevant front pages were located in a combination of

manual and computerized search. I located all of the front pages where one of the seven

kidnapping and captivity stories was a main topic of at least one of the items on the front page

(as apparent in the main headline and/or the lead), or where there was a picture of the captive or

a reference to him/her/them in a main headline. This search yielded a total of 809 front pages.

Analysis of the front pages included an examination of patterns of front-page visibility of

the different stories over time, as well as analysis of the selection, presentation and discursive

construction of the front-page coverage, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative

approaches to textual analysis. For the quantitative content analysis, I used a detailed coding

sheet, addressing various dimensions of the coverage, such as salience, main topic, main actors,

temporal dimensions, and the existence of opinions and criticism. In total, the coding scheme

included 60 questions, only some of which inform the subsequent analysis. 301 of the 809 front

pages were also coded by native speakers of the four relevant languages. Cohen’s Kappa for the

sixty questions ranged from .71 to .98 (p<.001 for all questions). The structured, close coding of

the front pages was accompanied by open coding, informed by a variety of methods of

qualitative textual analysis, in particular narrative analysis.

In addition to the front pages, the data for this article also includes the editorials that

referenced the seven case studies in the different newspapers, as well as discussions on the media


treatment of these stories by journalists, as appeared in trade journals and interviews with

journalists. The integrative analysis of the data followed a grounded theory approach (Glaser and

Strauss, 2007/1967; Corbin and Strauss, 2008), in which both the quantitative and qualitative

data supported the process of identifying patterns and generating analytical categories, based on

constant comparisons within and between cases.

General Levels of Visibility

There were substantial differences in the general level of visibility accorded to the different

cases. Table 1 presents the number of front pages that covered the seven cases of kidnapping and

captivity in the different newspapers, from the day of the abduction to a year after the release (or

in Shalit's case, in the first 1500 days of captivity), including only front pages where the relevant

case was a main topic of at least one of the items on the front page. The cases are ordered by the

length of the captivity period – from the shortest on the left to the longest on the right (the case

of Ingrid Betancourt, who spent more than six years in captivity).

[table 1 about here]

Four cells significantly deviate from all the rest – the number of front pages dedicated to

the story of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in the two Israeli newspapers and the number of front

pages dedicated to the cases of the French journalists in their home newspapers. That is, the

coverage of the case of Florence Aubenas in Libération and the coverage of the story of Chesnot

and Malbrunot in Le Figaro. On the other extreme, the cells with a zero or a low number of front

pages belong to one of two major groups: a) international coverage (i.e., coverage outside the

captive’s home country); and b) national coverage of the cases of U.S. captives (Carroll, Rohde,

and Gonsalves, Howes & Stansell). The table also suggests that longer cases are not necessarily

associated with more front pages.

How do we explain the patterns of difference and similarity in the general levels of


visibility given to the seven kidnapping cases by the different newspapers, beyond the expected

differences in level of coverage at the national and international level? One explanation concerns

the different political resonance of these cases. Of the four countries, the U.S. is the only country

in which kidnappings that occurred in the context of armed political conflicts are considered a

non-political issue, and where the head of state and other high-level political actors are not

personally involved in these cases (at least not visibly). This can be attributed in large part to the

generally non-debatable U.S. policy of not negotiating with hostage takers. It can also be seen as

a reaction to what was criticized as the problematic involvement of Presidents Carter and Reagan

in hostage situations that overshadowed their presidency, in particular the Iranian hostage crisis

of 1979-1981 and the case of the American hostages in Lebanon (see Nacos, 1994; Sick, 1990).

Another explanation concerns the relations of proximity between the captive and the

newspaper’s imagined community, and the ways in which these relations are symbolically and

strategically linked to a cultural-normative commitment to the captive. This can be the

commitment of the French journalistic community to its own journalists, most pronouncedly the

commitment of a newspaper to its own employee, or the symbolic commitment of the Israeli

national community to captive soldiers, a commitment which is based on a combination of

Jewish and military values and is channeled and reinforced by the national media. This is not to

say that the hyper-visibility of the case of Gilad Shalit in the Israeli news media, or that of the

cases of the French journalists in their home newspapers, were necessarily driven by ethical

impulses, but that these real and imagined impulses were used by the newspapers to mobilize

collective solidarities and sentiments. At the same time, it should be noted that relations of

proximity, power and commitment were also at the basis of the other side of visibility

management, that is, the strategic concealment of certain stories. In this regard, there is a crucial

difference between the de-facto low visibility of the three U.S. contractors held by the FARC,


and the strategic and active silencing of the story of New York Times journalist David Rohde.

A third set of explanations is related to different journalistic models and media systems.

The U.S. and France have long served as paradigmatic examples of two contrasting models of

journalism, one information-oriented, commercialized, and adhering to the ideal of objectivity;

the other interpretive, literary, critical, and more closely tied to the state and the political field

(Benson, 2005, 2010; Chalaby, 1996; Hallin and Benson 2007; Hallin and Mancini, 2004).

Hyper-visibility practices that are within the parameters of the French model cannot be easily

contained by mainstream U.S. newspapers, which tend to avoid practices that may be viewed as

advocacy, and to follow more ‘conventional,’ event-driven standards of news selection. As will

be shown below, some characteristics of the French and U.S. media coverage were not in line

with the ‘ideal’ journalistic models in each country, although the particular divergences were

also shaped to some extent by the constraints of the national journalistic cultures.

Both Israel and Colombia are characterized by rapidly changing journalistic models, which

are influenced, to different degrees, by both the U.S. and the French-European traditions (Bonilla

and Montoya, 2008; Caspi and Limor, 1999; Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002; Waisbord,

2000). However, one of the characteristics that connects the French and Israeli news media and

that was an important factor in the high visibility of cases of French and Israeli captives, is the

concentrated nature of the journalistic fields in the two countries and the high competition

between the national newspapers (see Benson, 2005; Caspi and Limor, 1999). This makes stories

about individual members of both the national and journalistic communities more likely to

become national news stories that newspapers compete over and at the same time cooperate in

shining the spotlight on them and using them for community building purposes.

A final set of explanations concerns the different paths chosen by the newspapers in

addressing the publicity dilemma of kidnapping stories, in particular the question of whether


high visibility will increase or decrease the chances of securing the release of the captives. As

will be shown below, these different choices are not unrelated to the above-described factors –

namely, the political resonance of the cases, proximity relations, and the different journalistic

models – but are rather enabled and constrained by them.

Sustained versus Delayed Visibility & Hiding in the Light

While the total amount of coverage is important, the more interesting questions concern the ways

in which the level of coverage is managed across time. The two temporal patterns that exhibit the

highest level of visibility management can be found in the coverage of the captive journalists’

stories in their home newspapers. The first pattern, which I call ‘sustained visibility,’ refers to

cases in which the story remains on the front page throughout the captivity period (or nearly all

of it). The two cases that clearly belong to this pattern are the coverage of the story of Florence

Aubenas in Libération and of Chesnot and Malbrunot in Le Figaro. That is, the coverage of the

cases of the French journalists in their home newspapers. The treatment of the case of David

Rohde by The New York Times represents the other extreme pattern, ‘delayed visibility,’ which is

characterized by a significant temporal delay in the publication of the story.

Figure 1 provides a visual illustration of these two patterns. The X axis represents the

number of days that passed since the abduction and each bar represents the number of front

pages over a two-week period. The line that cuts the X axis represents the day of the captive’s

release. The front-page coverage of the case of Florence Aubenes in Libération is represented by

a nearly flat distribution (the left histogram in Figure 1). The newspaper first reported of

Aubenas’s disappearance two days after the abduction (hence the shorter bar in the beginning of

the period), and ever since the story was on the front page of the newspaper every day until the

release of Aubenas six months later (the only exception, represented by the small hole in the

middle of the left histogram, was the day the front page was dedicated to the Pope’s death). After


the release, the story remained on the front page for four additional days. An almost identical

pattern can be found in the front-page coverage of the case of Chesnot and Malbrunot in Le

Figaro, although there the story was on and off the front page during the first 10 days following

the abduction, and then the daily coverage stabilized.

[Figure 1 about here]

The coverage of the case of David Rohde in The New York Times (the right histogram in

Figure 1) represents another extreme type of visibility management, which is almost the mirror

image of the previous pattern. Here, the newspaper abstained from coverage for the whole period

of captivity. It first reported on the story when Rohde managed to escape (the story then

remained on the front page for two days), and it returned to the story four months later in a series

of five front-page first-person accounts of Rohde’s experiences in captivity.

Sustained and delayed visibility represent contrasting approaches to the dilemma regarding

the level of publicity to be given to kidnapping cases. In the case of the French journalists, the

national news media chose the route of hypervisibility, with the most vigorous campaigns being

led by the journalists’ home newspapers (see de Gaudemar, 2005, 2006, and July, 2005 for

editorials that justify this strategy). In the case of David Rohde, The New York Times chose an

opposite path. When Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan the Times editors contacted major

news organizations and media outlets around the world and asked them to suppress the story,

including the fact of the kidnapping (see Kurtz, 2009; Bachko, 2009). The result was a media

blackout that was maintained until Rohde’s escape from captivity. It should be noted that the

case of kidnapped US journalist Jill Carroll also began with a media blackout, requested by the

editors of the Christian Science Monitor. However, the media blackout ended after two days,

when major news organizations refused to continue to sit on the story (Cabe, 2008).

The two extreme patterns of sustained and delayed visibility both express deep


commitment of the newspapers to the captives and a willingness to fully exercise their symbolic

power in ways that go against conventional journalistic standards. And yet, it does not seem a

coincidence that in the U.S. the pattern is that of concealment, whereas in France it is a pattern of

maximum visibility. While the French news media can also suppress particular kidnapping

stories, if required by the circumstances of the case (see de Gaudemar, 2006), it is very hard to

imagine a scenario in which the story of one individual would appear on the front page of the

New York Times every day for a period of several months (unless this individual is the

President). It is not necessarily that concealment is less in accordance with the professional

model of the mainstream US news media, but it is, among other things, less visible.

Importantly, the notion of ‘sustained visibility’ suggests not only continued visibility, but

an active maintenance of the story in the headlines. In the case of the French journalists,

maintaining the story on the front page involved, on the one hand, stretching to the maximum

dramatic developments, and, on the other hand, transforming conventional standards of

newsworthiness to fill in the gaps between available information and the constraints of the daily

front-page coverage. On one end of the spectrum we thus find prominent coverage of events that

belong to the ‘narrative backbone’ of kidnapping and captivity stories in the news media, in

particular the abduction, proofs of life, and the captives’ release. While the salience of these

front-page stories was very high, they constituted only a small percentage of the front-page

coverage (3.6% of the front pages in Libération that covered the Aubenas case and 4.8% of the

front pages that covered the case of Chesnot and Malbrunot in Le Figaro).

On the other end of the spectrum we find front-page countings of the amount of time that

passed since the abduction. Marking the time that passed since the abduction was the main topic

of 90% of the front pages that covered the case of Florence Aubenas in Libération and 85% of

the front pages that covered the case of Chesnot and Malbrunot in Le Figaro. Part of it involved


prominently marking round number of days in captivity (e.g., one hundred days), but most of it

was smaller daily front-page countings of the amount of time that had passed since the

abduction/disappearance. Every day, in the absence of other suitable front-page stories, the

default was to put the pictures of the captives on the front page and count the number of days

that passed since they were captured. In Libération, for example, the repeated template included

the pictures of Florence Aubenas and Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi (her interpreter), the headline

‘Disappeared XX days ago’ (55 days ago, 56 days ago, etc.), and a text which read: ‘Yesterday

evening there was no new information on the fate of our reporter Florence Aubenas and her

guide Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi, who disappeared in Iraq since January 5th.’ After the release of

a proof-of-life video of Aubenas, the headline was changed to ‘Abducted XX days ago,’ and the

text was changed to: ‘A video which shows Florence Aubenas calling for help was broadcast on

March 1st. Our special correspondent was kidnapped in Iraq on January 5th with her guide

Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi, of whom we remain without news.’

What do we make of these daily countings? The act of counting and marking time has

various ritual and mnemonic dimensions, which will not be elaborated in this article (see

Tenenboim-Weinblatt, forthcoming). However, in the context of the newspapers’ attempts to

maintain visibility and narrative continuity, we can consider these daily countings ‘narrative

fillers,’ or what Barthes (1977: 93) called ‘catalysers.’ That is, episodes that do not advance the

plot, but sustain the story and fill in the spaces between its main nodes. At the informational

level, none of the past events mentioned in the above-quoted texts from Libération (i.e., the

disappearance/abduction itself and the release of the video) constitutes new information.

However, these countings are constructed as news using two discursive strategies. The first

strategy is the frame of no-news news (‘yesterday evening there was no new information...’), or

in its positive articulation: the news is the continuation of the same situation (the situation of


captivity). However, to better qualify as news there needs to be some change in the world’s state

of affairs. The change, in this context, is time. The only thing that changes from one day to

another (and which changes in the headline) is the amount of time that passed since the

abduction. In a sense, then, what we have here is the minimal development that can be reported

as news – the passing of time. Even if nothing else happens, time passes, and in this context, it

becomes a news fact in itself.

Treating the passage of time as newsworthy information in its own right and the

paradoxical construction of the lack of news as news are two typical strategies of elastic

newsworthiness, which were also found (to a lesser degree) in few of the other kidnapping cases.

It is suggested that we would find this refashioning of what is considered front-page news in

other cases in which what drives the coverage is not necessarily events that meet conventional

standards of newsworthiness, but the desire to maintain the story on the front page.

However, alongside the glowing light that was shed on the cases of the French journalists,

some things remained in the dark. In the Aubenas case, for example, while the story did not get

off the front page of Libération and while readers received ample information on issues such as

mobilization activities, they could not find in the coverage anything related to government

activities. There was no coverage of the negotiations with the captors, no coverage or criticism of

what the government and the intelligence services did or did not do to secure the release of the

hostages, and no debate on what needed to be done. Significantly, this silence was not due to

lack of activity by the government. It was a strategic silence whose purpose was to avoid

jeopardizing the negotiations. As chief editor Antoine de Gaudemar explained: ‘Negotiation

requires silence and secrecy, but not the mobilization, which needs to be heard and seen’ (2005:

6). The result was a paradoxical situation of maximum visibility of this story and minimum

publicity in the normative democratic sense. The paradox grows when we consider the fact that


this was done in the name of freedom of information and freedom of the press, which were

repeatedly presented as a justification for the vigorous campaign for the release of the captive

journalists. Hyper-visibility is thus not necessarily associated with full visibility. Or in John

Peters’s words, while ‘one can hide from the light; one can also hide in the light’ (2005: 248).

Cyclical Visibility & Negotiations in the Media Light

Between the two extreme patterns of media blackout and daily front-page coverage throughout

the captivity period, we find different levels and combinations of silences, isolated reports, and

continuous front-page coverage. Of these, the coverage of the case of the Israeli soldier Gilad

Shalit in the Israeli news media constitutes the richest and most instructive example in relation to

longitudinal visibility management and the interplay between different dimensions of visibility.

The coverage of the Shalit case in the Israeli news media bears some similarities to the

coverage of the cases of the French journalists in their home newspapers. In terms of sheer

number of front pages, the level of visibility was similar, amounting to more than 100 front

pages (see Table 1). Furthermore, there were similarities in some of the strategies applied by the

French and Israeli newspapers to maintain this high level of visibility against the scarcity of

‘actual’ news developments, such as the marking and counting of time, and the no-news news.

Finally, both the French journalists and Shalit had to be collectivized and symbolized in order to

mobilize and sustain collective solidarities for an extended period of time and to justify the

hyper-visibility of these cases. While the French journalists were constructed as emblems of

freedom of speech, Shalit was constructed as ‘everybody’s son’ – a notion that drew its force

from the special status of soldiers in a country with a compulsory military service. However,

there were two important differences between these cases related to the pattern of visibility

management over time and the nature of this visibility.

First, rather than continuous front-page coverage, the Shalit case was based on ebbs and


flows of coverage over five years, resulting in a ritual-cyclical pattern (see Figure 2). Central to

this pattern is the phenomenon of media waves, characterized by heightened media visibility

given to a particular issue for several days (Vasterman, 2005, Wolfsfeld and Sheafer, 2006;

Zaller, 2003). While news waves were also prevalent in other captivity cases, the number of

waves was the largest in coverage of the Shalit case in the Israeli newspapers. Operationally, a

wave was defined as any group that included at least two consecutive front pages on the topic.

The ‘length’ of a wave was determined by the number of continuous front pages. In the case of

Shalit there were 27 waves of coverage in Ha’aretz and 22 waves in Yedioth Ahronoth. The next

largest number of waves detected in this study was 11 waves in the coverage of the case of Ingrid

Betancourt in El Tiempo. Most of these waves were clustered toward the end of her captivity.

In the case of Shalit, the first wave followed the abduction, and six other big waves, each

consisting of 5-11 continuous front pages, emerged at either crucial points of the negotiations for

the release of Shalit (or what was constructed as crucial points), or around public mobilization

activities. Each of these waves raised hopes for the release of Shalit, instigated public debate,

mobilized collective sentiments, and ended bitterly following a realization that the story’s happy

ending would have to wait for another wave. A similar dynamics could be found toward the end

of Betancourt’s captivity, with waves of coverage that surrounded international initiatives and

that were ritually constructed as “windows of opportunity” to save Betancourt (see also

Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013). In both cases, the waves of front-page coverage were sustained not

by reports on recent changes in the state of affairs regarding these stories, but by practices such

as countdowns and future-oriented reporting, on the one hand (e.g., front-page headlines such as

‘Twenty four hours to reach a resolution on the Sahlit deal’; Ha’aretz, 16 Mar 2009), and, on the

other hand, reports on ongoing situations (e.g., front-page headlines such as ‘The mission for

Ingrid is still waiting’; El Tiempo, 5 Apr 2008).


[Figure 2 about here]

However, it is important to emphasize that the cyclical pattern is not caused by inertia, nor

does it involve the media alone. Rather, generating and sustaining these waves is based on

cooperation between the news media and different actors who have an interest in media visibility

at strategic points in time. Tami Shinkman, the Shalit family's media advisor, described in an

interview to the trade journal The Seventh Eye (Persico, 2009) how before the end of the Olmert

government (in March 2009) representatives from her public relations firm had meetings with

heads and senior editors of all the major news organizations in Israel to convince them of the

need to put the story on the top of the media agenda. She also described how they supplied the

media with materials that would help them put the story on the front page during this major

media wave, such as a picture of Shalit as a child in a clown costume. This picture, which does

not fit any traditional criteria of newsworthiness, filled most of the newspaper’s front page on

Purim (the Jewish costume holiday), under the headline ‘Sad Clown’ (Yedioth Ahronoth, 10 March

2009).

Another important difference between the coverage of the cases of the French journalists in

their home newspapers and the coverage of the Shalit case in the Israeli news media is that while

in the cases of the captive journalists the French newspapers suppressed information regarding

the negotiations between the government and the captors, largely refrained from criticizing the

government or from expressing opinions on what needed to be done to secure the release of the

hostages, and in general emphasized solidarity and unity over conflict and debate, in the case of

Shalit the Israeli newspapers took the opposite path. All of the dimensions that were suppressed

by the French newspapers were center stage in the Israeli news media. Thus, for example, 55%

of the front-page coverage of the Shalit case in the Israeli newspapers was coverage surrounding

the demands of the captors and the mediated negotiations between Hamas and the Israeli


government for the release of Shalit (a category which constituted merely 1% of the front-page

coverage of the captive journalists in their home newspapers). Rounds of negotiations between

Israel and the Hamas were surrounded by big news waves in the Israeli news media, in addition

to regular status updates on the state of the negotiations. While some of these status reports

referred to actual developments (i.e., a change in the state of affairs), although often not major

ones (headlines such as ‘Israel confirmed: We received the list of prisoners demanded by Hamas’,

Ha’aretz, 8 Apr 2007), others belonged to the category of ‘no-news news,’ or things that have not

yet happened. This can be seen in front-page headlines such as ‘The Prime Minister to Shalit

family: “There has been no progress in the release of Gilad”’ (Ha’aretz, 24 Dec 2007).

Israeli newspapers provided information not only on the status of the negotiations but also

on the actual positions of the different sides, including details about the demands of Hamas (e.g.,

the number and identity of the prisoners that they wanted released), Israel’s answers, and the

internal disagreements on both sides. Finally, criticism of the government was also more

frequent in the Israeli coverage of the Shalit case than in any of the other cases and newspapers.

Almost 20% of the front pages that covered the case of Gilad Shalit in the Israeli newspapers

included some kind of criticism of the government or the head of state, compared to less than 1%

in the coverage of the cases of the French journalists in their home newspapers, 3% in the

coverage of the case of Ingrid Betancourt in both Colombia and France, and no government

criticism at all in the U.S. front-page coverage of the cases of U.S. captives.

On the one hand, the high visibility of the negotiations and the relatively high visibility of

government criticism can be seen as serving the interests of Shalit, by keeping the story on the

public agenda and exerting pressure on the government to resolve it, while at the same time

fulfilling the news media’s democratic duty of keeping the government in check and supporting

informed public debate on an issue that relates to core cultural values and can have important


regional and personal implications for Israelis. On the other hand, one can argue that not only did

the hypervisibility reduce the chances of reaching a deal (by either raising Shalit’s value or

‘tying’ the two sides to their publicized demands), but that this is one of the cases in which

secrecy may raise the quality of political deliberation (see Chambers, 2004; Gutmann and

Thompson, 1996), among other things by giving the deliberating parties more freedom to

compromise and change their minds. In this context, it is telling that the prisoner-exchange deal

to release Shalit (signed in October 2011) was eventually reached outside of the media’s eye.

Conclusion

In this article I analyzed the ways in which different news outlets addressed the question of how

much and what sort of visibility to give to kidnapping and captivity cases, while focusing on

three rich patterns of longitudinal visibility management and exploring the practices, discourses,

paradoxes and explanatory factors associated with these patterns. The analysis demonstrated the

complex interplay between different layers of visibility and invisibility in the treatment of cases

of kidnapping and captivity by the news media. At one level, we can talk about an axis of

hypervisibility and concealment, with ‘sustained visibility’ as representing one end of the axis

and ‘delayed visibility’ as representing the other end. However, even at the edge, visibility is

incorporating elements of concealment. Thus, in the case of the kidnapped French journalists, the

hyper-visibility of the stories was accompanied by suppression of information on the

negotiations and the government’s activities to secure the release of the hostages, resulting in a

situation of ‘hiding in the light.’ This was opposite to the case of Shalit, where the hyper-

visibility of the story also included detailed information and criticism on the government’s

negotiations with Hamas. In this case, however, the informative-deliberative-watchdog purposes

of publicity were put in the service of the ritual, community-building functions of journalism (cf.

Carey, 1989). The movement is therefore not only between different positions on a singular axis


of visibility and publicity on one side and invisibility on the other, but a combination of vertical

and horizontal movements across different dimensions of visibility.

The analysis also shows that we should think of the patterns of visibility of a particular

story or issue over time not only as a representation of the sum of individual newsworthiness

decisions but also as determining these selections. In other words, the patterns of sustained,

delayed and cyclical visibility were built not only bottom-up but also top-down, shaping what

constituted news at different points in time. In narrative terms, while the pattern of sustained

visibility can be seen as a telenovela – a daily serial over a period of several months, which starts

with the journalists’ abduction and terminates with the happy ending of their return – cyclical

visibility can be viewed as a long-running series with separate seasons. In both cases, as well as

in delayed visibility, the different constraints that were placed by the longitudinal narrative

patterns led to varied practices of elastic newsworthiness.

In considering the differences in the level and type of visibility given to the different stories

by different newspapers, it is difficult to disentangle the influence of the journalistic culture and

the media system from the influence of factors such as the political and cultural resonance of this

particular type of stories, or the different campaign strategies employed in the studied cases.

Further comparative research is needed to explore the conditions and factors that shape practices

of visibility management across different journalistic cultures and different types of news stories.

Finally, while coverage of kidnapping and captivity stories is not generalizable to the

coverage of other stories in the examined newspapers and countries, it is the type of strategic

stories that allow us to look at points of negotiation, experimentation and boundary expansion

vis-à-vis established journalistic models and traditional definitions of news in different cultural

contexts. Looking at practices of visibility management associated with culturally-significant

news stories can thus be a productive avenue for understanding not only the ways in which the


stories’ visibility is managed but also the paths that news media take in their own struggles for

visibility.

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Table 1: Number of front pages covering the cases by newspaper

Jill

Carroll

Chesnot &

Malbrunot

Florence

Aubenas

David

Rohde

Gilad

Shalit

Gonsalves,

Howes &

Stansell

Ingrid

Betancourt

El Tiempo

(Colombia)

0 1 0 0 6 21 64

Le Figaro

(France)

0 104

6 0 7 0 34

Le Monde

(France)

0 17 9 0 3 0 22

Libération

(France)

0 19 137

0 2 0 9

Ha’aretz

(Israel)

0 0 1 0 148 0 2

Yedioth

Ahronoth

(Israel)

0 0 0 0 127 0 0

NY Times

(USA)

2 0 0 7 7 0 2

USA Today

(USA)

1 0 0 0 0 1 1

Washington Post

(USA)

2 0 0 1 1 3 3

LA Times

(USA)

2 0 0 0 3 3 3

Christian

Science Monitor

(USA)

20 0 0 0 6 1 2

Total 27 141 153 8 309 29 142


Figure 1: Sustained vs. delayed visibility. On the left, front-page coverage of the case of

Florence Aubenas in Libération (sustained visibility). On the right, front-page coverage of

the case of David Rohde in The New York Times (delayed visibility)

Figure 2: Cyclical visibility. Front-page coverage of the case of Gilad Shalit in the Israeli news

media during the first 1500 days of Shalit’s captivity (each bar represents the number of front

pages in Ha’aretz and Yedioth Ahronoth over a 30 day period).

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