Keep Tice in our hearts and the headlines

In the fall of 2012, not long after their son Austin was detained while reporting in Syria, Debra and Marc Tice received a call from Terry Anderson at their Houston home. Anderson, the former Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, had been abducted in Lebanon in March 1985 while returning home from a tennis game. A huge public campaign for Anderson’s release made him America’s best-known hostage. He was freed in December 1991, after spending nearly seven years in captivity.

The Tices were grateful to hear from Anderson and for his expression of concern. But they were also unsettled. “At the time, we weren’t thinking about the possibility that Austin’s case could go on for months or years,” Marc Tice told me.

But it has.

Today, Aug. 14, marks six years since Austin Tice went missing. His parents believe that keeping their son’s case in the public spotlight is critical to their efforts to bring him home. But after so many years, they are struggling to do so.

“Journalists stay in touch with us, but without a ‘new development,’ their organizations seem more and more reluctant to devote space to the fact that one of their own continues to be held against his will,” Austin’s father noted with some frustration.

In fact, there are few new developments to report or at least ones that the Tices can share. They have never been contacted by Austin’s captors and no demands have been made. However, U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Tice is alive and in April the FBI offered a reward of $1 million for information leading to his safe return.

The contrast between Terry Anderson’s kidnapping — which dominated public attention during the years of his captivity — and the struggles of the Tice family to raise awareness about their son’s situation stem from a variety of factors.

Anderson’s kidnapping was part of a wave of abductions of Westerners carried out by Shiite militias in Lebanon, each of which was front page news. Hezbollah and its offshoot Islamic Jihad sought to use the kidnappings to raise awareness for their cause and put pressure on Israel and the United States, both of which had become participants in the Lebanese civil war. They wanted publicity and released photos and videos of Anderson and the other hostages in captivity.

Anderson’s employer, the AP, and his sister Peggy Say, rallied the American public, helping to make his case something of a national obsession. The U.S. government was involved at the highest level and the media covered it constantly. When Anderson was finally released in 1991, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “The Smile of Freedom.”

Austin Tice, by contrast, was a freelancer with only a handful of stories under his belt when he was captured. The Tice family has had the backing of the Washington Post and McClatchy, both of which published Tice’s stories. But the U.S. media had grown more fractured, polarized and focused on domestic politics (i.e. Trump) than it was during Anderson’s kidnapping. Three decades later, there are far fewer foreign bureaus, and it’s harder to to get the media to cover international stories, even when there is a U.S. angle.

Anderson, who today is semiretired and lives in Virginia, supports the Tice family’s efforts to draw attention to their son’s case. Media attention, he told me, keeps pressure on the U.S. government and potentially on the Syrian government, to whom the Tices have appealed for help. There’s also the hope that Austin Tice, wherever he is, will hear through the media about the efforts to win his release, boosting his spirits and making him feel less isolated and alone.

Beyond traditional media, there is also social media, a resource that did not exist during Anderson’s time in captivity. When I visited Houston last year, I met with the Tices and they asked me if I would use my Twitter account to raise awareness about Austin’s detention. I told them I would Tweet out #FreeAustinTice each Monday morning until Austin comes home. I’ve been doing it ever since and urge others to join me, using the social media platform of choice. It’s one small effort that each of us can make to insure that Austin’s case will never be forgotten until he returns home.