Patty Hearst and the Era of Televised Terror

When it comes to terror how comparable are the 1970's to today? Does this period in US history need to be acknowledged more? In light of this history about the Left do current protestations from the Left about right-wing violence ring hollow?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/patty-hearst-and-the-era-of-televised-terror-1469806518

Patty Hearst and the Era of Televised Terror
A spree of terrorist bombings in the 1970s helped create today’s media world of widely broadcast violence

By Jeffrey Toobin
The horrific terrorist violence that we have witnessed in the U.S. in recent months—San Bernardino, Orlando, Dallas, Baton Rouge—might seem unprecedented. But just decades ago, the country was threatened by a far broader terrorist campaign. What was different then, at least at first, was that we couldn’t immediately see and experience the attacks. Once the threat could unfold in real time before our eyes, everything changed—and a new media world came into existence.

In the 1970s, a militant revolutionary ethos took hold in a substantial part of the American counterculture. The resulting bombings and shootings make today’s domestic terrorist threat look modest, or at least remote. Though the various far-left factions didn’t coordinate their attacks and their goals were often hazy, the 1970s were a period of tremendous domestic violence.

To a degree that is almost unimaginable today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression. Some radical groups tried to avoid civilian casualties, but there was still a significant death toll. According to FBI statistics, in 1972, there were 1,962 actual and attempted bombings in the U.S., with 25 people killed; in 1973, 1,955 bombings, with 22 killed; in 1974, 2,044 bombings, with 24 killed.


Four young men used a homemade bomb to blow up Sterling Hall, home to the University of Wisconsin's Army Math Research Center, Aug. 24, 1970.

Law enforcement officers sift through debris in a restroom on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol after the Weather Underground set off a bomb in the area, March 1, 1971.

Investigators search the probation office of the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, Mass., after a bombing by the United Freedom Front, a small Marxist group, April 22, 1976.
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES; AP(2)
As with today’s threats, it took live television to make crime and terrorism real—and the new era began with one story in particular: the kidnapping of the publishing heiress Patricia Hearst. Her case was the spark that, in large measure, gave rise to the media world that envelops us today.

Patricia Hearst posed in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army emblem, April 1974.
Patricia Hearst posed in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army emblem, April 1974. PHOTO: CSU ARCHIVES/EVERETT COLLECTION
Hearst was kidnapped by the self-styled, ultraleftist revolutionaries who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, on Feb. 4, 1974. It was a huge story at the time, but at first, the media attention was modest by modern standards—because there was so much less media.

National television news consisted of three half-hour network shows, plus NBC’s “Today” show. (ABC’s “Good Morning America” made its debut in November 1975.) Newsmagazines loved the Hearst saga. (The first issue of People came out in March 1974, a few weeks after the kidnapping.) At the time, one oft-cited measure of the media obsession with the story was that Newsweek put Hearst on its cover seven times. For a contemporary observer, that feat might prompt only bewilderment. (What’s Newsweek? What’s a cover?)

The pivot to our new media world began on a specific date. The Hearst story took a stunning turn when surveillance cameras showed the 20-year-old heiress brandishing a machine gun and joining her captors in robbing a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. After the robbery, Hearst and eight of her SLA comrades fled to Los Angeles, the hometown of their leader, Donald DeFreeze, who called himself General Field Marshal Cinque. There, Hearst, along with two other SLA members, became separated from the rest of the group.


On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team (itself a new invention) surrounded the other six SLA militants in a small house in South Central Los Angeles. One local television station, KNXT, received a tip about the location of the standoff.

In those days, local stations sent out camera crews to shoot film that had to be developed back at their studios. But KNXT—which stood for “experimental television”—had a new technology that allowed it to broadcast live from the field through a microwave transmitter attached to a small truck. The technology was so new that the team at KNXT is said to have invented its name: the minicam.

In 1972, the U.S. endured 1,962 actual and attempted bombings.