Several high-profile hijackings occurred in the 1970s and were covered by the media. One such hijacking was of the French Airbus A300 Flight 139 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on 27 June 1976. In this article, I examined the causes of the nature of newspaper reportage of the June/July 1976 hijacking and hostage-taking involving an African state under President Idi Amin whose actions in the affair drew international attention to Uganda. Drawing on archival data, the paper article analyses the four newspapers’ portrayal of the Entebbe hostage-taking from 28 June to 3 July 1976 and the subsequent Israel Raid on 4 July 1976. The newspapers’ focused on are, the New York Times, The Guardian, The Times (London) and the Christian Science Monitor. In this article, I argue that the four newspapers’ reportage ranging from hostage-taking to the rescue depended on the political and social contexts under which they operated at the time, namely, the Cold War politics of the time. The newspapers focused covered more about on the rescue and its aftermath than the events leading to the hijacking and hostage-taking which obscured a clear understanding of the deeper causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that used Idi Amin and Uganda as a pawn.