The news of former US president Jimmy Carter's death is what prompts me to write this post. The Iran hostage crisis began in November of 1979 and stretched on for 444 days, ending only after Jimmy Carter had left the White House in January of 1981. It was a major factor in his defeat in the 1980 presidential election against Ronald Reagan.
In 1986 my case study titled "Television and U.S. Foreign Policy: The case of the Iran Hostage Crisis, " was published in the Journal of Communication. In recent years, that study has consistently been cited by some influential scholars of political communication and I've wondered exactly why, so I decided to look into it. A PDF copy of the article can be found on Google Scholar, along with a bar chart showing annual citations by year and links to each of the citations. One reason for the scholarly interest is that the article was included as a chapter in Doris Graber's book, Media Power in Politics, 1990. Seven of the 98 citations were to the chapter in her book. Other reasons for continued interest in the study are the highly visual character of television news and the nature of its relationship to the foreign policy process in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time Walter Cronkite was still anchoring the CBS Evening News and he was known to many as the most trusted man in America. Instead of concluding his news telecast with "and that's the way it is on this ____st day of November" Cronkite adapted it to ".. and that's the way it is on this ____day of captivity for the American hostages in Tehran..." thus providing a nightly countdown reminding viewers of the duration of the hostage crisis.