FILE - This is a Friday Jan. 9, 2015 file photo of police officers as they storm the kosher market where a gunman held several hostages, in Paris. The assault came moments after a similar raid on the building where two brothers suspected in the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre were cornered. The killing of four French Jews in last week’s hostage standoff at a Paris kosher market has deepened the fears among European Jewish communities shaken by rising anti-Semitism and feeling vulnerable by poor security and a large number of potential soft targets. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

PARIS - France's broadcasting watchdog met with television and radio executives on Thursday to discuss "failures" in the coverage of last week's terror attacks after some relatives of hostages accused certain French TV stations of endangering the captives in a bid to produce high ratings.

The Higher Broadcasting Council, a body known as the French "broadcasting police," regulates television and radio stations — and its nine government-appointed members have the power to sanction or fine them for wrongdoing. After Thursday's closed hearing, it will release a ruling in early February which could contain new rules for broadcasters.

Stations contacted after the hearing said they would have no immediate comment.

The accusations relate to coverage of France's most dramatic terror attacks in decades, which had millions glued to their television sets. Twenty people were killed, including the three attackers, in three days of terror that ended Friday with twin raids on a printing plant and a kosher supermarket in the Paris area.

At the printing plant north of Paris, Lilian Lepere was hiding under a sink, apparently unbeknownst to the gunmen. Lepere's sister said on France 2 television that the family had stopped calling him so as not to compromise his hiding place — an admission that could have alerted the gunmen to her brother's presence.

Lepere was released unharmed. But the Higher Broadcasting Council that same day issued a warning to news media to "act with the greatest discernment."

"It's an ethical problem," said French commentator and political scientist Dominique Moisi. "If you want to be ahead of the police because that's the way to attract your public, if you deal with those things like a kind of live show, it can because dangerous and prejudicial. Because by the end of the day, you forget that there are real lives at stake."

In the other standoff, the wife of one hostage accused BFM-TV of putting her husband and others at risk by revealing their hiding place in the freezer of a kosher grocery store.

"You nearly made a huge, huge mistake, BFM," the woman, whom the station did not name, said on the air the next day. "The terrorist was watching BFM. ... Fortunately he did not see that, otherwise my husband and the five others would be dead."

BFM said the woman got her facts wrong, but admitted revealing the secret hideout of a woman "hidden in the cold room" live on air while the gunman was inside and reportedly watching BFM, but BFM deputy editor Alexis Delahousse defended the decision.

"Police said it was OK to say this, as she was no longer in danger," he told The Associated Press. "If (gunman Amedy) Coulibaly had gone to the back to get to the cold room, police said they would have been able to neutralize him or shoot him."

One hostage who called himself Nessim told Liberation newspaper that Coulibaly had a personal computer with him and was "very interested in news channels that were giving live coverage of his actions."

"He got angry: 'What's that, there are no deaths?'" the newspaper quoted Nessim as saying.

Coulibaly then telephoned BFM-TV to give the correct death count and told Delahousse, in a rambling speech, of his allegiance to the Islamic State group.

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Thomas Adamson can be followed at http://Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

News from © The Associated Press, 2015