I run my nightly backup thru a crontab job. Is there any way to get the message to mount a new tape to the console? Currently it appears to go to an email.

EDIT : I guess I'm not 100% certain for your question, I thought that you want output of the cron command to be printed onto terminal, if yes, read my suggestion below, if not, please disregard.
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I think yes, just pipe the command like :
0 * * * * * /your-script possible parameters | wall
depending on your system type and with respective parameters. Read the man pages for wall, which actually will write the message to all users, so it may not be a good solution.
Instead, you can use "write" if present, from "man write" :

It will be good if you test the command from CLI first, before adding it to cronjob.
I can't think of anything more usable at this moment, there may be more efficient solutions.