Fake news doesn’t just mean ‘lies’. Outright, known, falsehoods are just the most extreme form of fake news. More common and far more insidious is misleading content: the deceptive use or framing of true information to skew an issue. Especially when it’s packed into the headline: in an age when the vast majority of news is consumed online, most people tend to skim the headline and lede at most before moving on.
A classic case in point comes from – surprise, surprise – the New Zealand Herald.
Israel says ‘jihadist’ pilot tried to crash flight from Dubai, passengers fought back to prevent disaster.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says one of the pilots of a Tel Aviv-bound Flydubai flight tried to crash the plane and kill its passengers, after the aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
See what the Ferald did, there? Israel says, as if we only have their word to take for it. Jihadist in scare quotes. Big, bad Bibi in the lede.
Perhaps it’s just clumsy, or really is what it looks like: a trifecta of attempted deception, giving every appearance of trying to subconsciously frame the incident for the Herald’s left-leaning audience to dismiss this attempted Islamic terror attack as, somehow, some kind of ‘Zionist’ ‘false flag’.
Mind you, the Ferald has some pretty stiff competition in the fake news stakes, when it comes to this attempted terror attack.
Even Australia’s taxpayer-funded Marxist propaganda collective managed to play the headline straight(ish):
Passengers save plane bound for Israel after mid-air stabbing
No mention of terror or jihadism, but still better than the Herald’s sorry effort.
Pravda-on-the-Yarra wins a gold star for not beating around the bush:
‘I grabbed the terrorist’: How hero passengers helped save Flight FZ1073
Yaniv Hayoun and others on board the flight to Tel Aviv stopped a pilot from sending the Flydubai Boeing 737 MAX crashing to the ground.
So, what actually happened?
Flydubai is a sister airline of Dubai’s flagship Emirates line. The UAE has become a popular holiday destination for Israelis since US President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords led to normalised relations between the nations. The commercial flight carrying 174 people, mostly Israelis, and bound for Tel Aviv took off from Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday morning, local time. There were two pilots in the cockpit and another two on board to fly the plane back to Dubai.
Two hours into the flight, the plane began a sudden, violent descent. Passengers heard the sounds of a struggle and a man calling for help – from the cockpit.
The first officer, an Omani citizen, stabbed and seriously injured the Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, apparently intent on crashing the plane in a suicide attack.
Citing local security sources, Israeli media outlets and Reuters said the incident was being treated as a terror attack.
In echoes of the heroism of Flight 93 on 9/11, Machchhar, lying on the floor and covered in blood, managed to unlock the cabin door, and several passengers stormed the cockpit. In a fight which left at least two of them injured, they overpowered the first officer and restrained him.
[Passenger Yaniv Hayoun] said after a passenger saw the stabbing, he and others pushed into the cockpit, where he saw the unharmed pilot apparently trying to destroy the controls, Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 reported […]
Mr Hayoun said he grabbed the controls and pulled them as he had seen on television before other crew members took over […]
Verified images from inside the flight showed men covered in blood.
One of the passengers on board, Itzhak Liber, posted a video to social media shortly before the plane landed, in which he said: “We are here on the plane. There was a crazy man with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots.”
The Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia reports that Mr Machchhar is in a stable condition, while Mr Netanyahu praised his “extraordinary bravery”. Mr Netanyahu was also photographed hugging a bloodied Mr Hayoun. “I look at you and I see a lion. I see a great hero,” the PM said.
In the meantime, the rest of us might ask: how many ‘lone wolves’ have to attack before we admit there’s a problem with the pack?
