philadelphia newscaster spoiler

Actually, the reporter who was murdered was Bill Stewart, who was killed by a Nicaraguan Guardia lieutenant on June 20, 1979. An experienced foreign correspondent, Stewart had been in Nicaragua for a month reporting for the American Broadcasting Corporation News (ABC) on the civil war between the American-backed government and the leftist Sandinistas. Stewart was originally from West Virginia, and was a 1963 graduate of Ohio State University. The actual video can be found at http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f166/television-journalist-bill-stewart-summarily-shot-nicaraguan-govt-forces-1979-a-18537/

On June 20, 1979 Stewart was traveling in a van in the capital city of Managua with his camera crew when they were stopped at a checkpoint run by the Nicaraguan National Guard, the main force of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The van was marked as a press vehicle as a precaution. Under Fire portrays in the film how this worked, and what was required for TV and other press crews to get stories out of Nicaragua and on to US and International television and other media - it was sometimes a pretty dangerous job.

The young Guardia lieutenant in charge of the checkpoint saw Stewart peer out of the passenger window, and approached him and ordered him out of the vehicle. Stewart was accompanied by Juan Espinosa, his interpreter. Stewart held a white flag and possessed official press documentation from the Nicaraguan government. Stewart was escorted a few meters away from the van and his cameraman Jack Clark (on whom the film's Nolte character, photographer Russell Price, is loosely based) began filming the scene. Clark filmed as Stewart was forced first to kneel and then to lie face down on the ground. The lieutenant then put his rifle to the back of Stewart's head and fired, then kicked Stewart in the head, then fired again, killing the reporter. Espinosa, the translator, was killed moments later. The film did not develop a character based directly on Espinosa, although the woman translator/rebel leader serves in this role in a very general way.

When it was received in ABC's New York headquarters, the film footage shocked Stewart's colleagues, and ABC and the other US networks ran the footage in their evening news broadcasts the same day. Over the next few days the footage was broadcast repeatedly in the United States and around the world. This horrified the international and US public and ultimately caused President Carter's government to turn openly against Somoza's tottering regime. Before the shooting, Nicaragua had been a controversial subject. Most US officials argued Somoza and his regime must be kept in power as a bulwark against Communism. The dramatic surge in public anger following Stewart's murder changed that position completely and, in many ways, lead to Somoza's much faster downfall that might have otherwise been when US political, economic and (most significantly) military support and assistance was withdrawn. Somoza left Nicaragua less than a month later on July 19, 1979 and was murdered in Paraguay, where fellow dictator Alfredo Stroessner had given him political asylum and military protection, by a Sandinista assassination team near his exile home on September 17, 1980. Somoza was attacked with rocket propelled grenades by a seven-person Sandinista commando team (four men and three women) in what became known as "Operation Reptile".

There was never any explanation as to why Stewart had been shot. The lieutenant disappeared. It is assumed that the soldiers knew Stewart was an American reporter. But at that point with the regime collapsing the soldiers were tired, angry, and badly led (as the film powerfully portrays in many scenes, including the scene where Gene Hackman's character is killed) and may not have appreciated or cared about the damage the killing would inflict on the regime. Of course, this had been one of the big criticisms of Tacho, his brother and their father for decades - that they were too arrogant or stupid to think about how their precipitous crap would effect things far larger than themselves. By 1979 the regime had become so corrupt that arrogance and stupidity had trickled down to many levels of leadership, probably including the lieutenant in question. There does not appear to have been a conspiracy to murder Stewart, although that observation is not based on any researched evidence, but rather on what appeared to be the general mood at the time in the nation's government and armed forces. The actual possibility of a conspiracy is not known, and I don't know and haven't heard about the existence of any investigations into the incident. Any investigations that the Nicaraguans would have conducted while Somoza was still in power would have been pretty useless anyway.

In another embarrassing and controversial part of this story, it later came out that the U.S. government refused to help ABC and Stewart's family bring his body back to the United States; the West German government eventually stepped in and made arrangements for Stewart's family to regain his body in the United States.

All in all, Stewart's murder was one of the low points of the 1970s, especially in how it glaringly brought out how idiotic the cold war mentality of allowing any right wing government to do pretty much anything it wanted, just so long as they weren't communist, was. This same philosophy is what allowed the US to support South Africa, countless murdering bastard dictatorships around the world, and justified support for many other murders and civil rights obliterations during the cold war. With Somoza, like most of the murdering bastards, eventually what went around came around, and he died at the hands of the loved ones of those he murdered and tortured.

Under Fire, in my view, makes this point with alacrity and vision. It is a good film.