Imagine sitting on an airplane at 34,000 feet. Breakfast has been served. You are flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv with more than 170 other people, most of them Israelis.
Then the plane drops. Not turbulence. Not a little shake. It plunges thousands of feet. People scream. Something is happening near the cockpit. Eventually, passengers discover the horrifying truth: One pilot has stabbed the other and, according to Israeli officials, is attempting to crash the aircraft.
Passengers and crew rush forward. They overpower the attacker. Others help regain control of the plane. Backup pilots eventually land it safely in Saudi Arabia.
I SURVIVED A HIJACKING IN 1972. THE FLYDUBAI CRISIS PROVES ONE BRUTAL TRUTH
You survive. Then you turn on the news and see words such as “a pilot brawl,” a “fight,” or an “altercation.”
I have spent much of my career inside newsrooms. I understand exactly how this happens. Sometimes what looks like the wrong headline hours later wasn’t wrong when it was written. Breaking news unfolds in real time. A headline reflects what journalists can responsibly confirm at that moment, and the picture can change dramatically minutes later.
Flydubai Flight 1073 offers an extraordinary example. The flight departed Dubai for Tel Aviv before one pilot stabbed the captain, according to Israeli officials and passenger accounts. Flight tracking data showed the aircraft entering a dramatic descent. Passengers and crew ultimately subdued the attacker, and other pilots safely landed the aircraft in Saudi Arabia.
The motive remains under investigation, and that matters. Journalists should not declare a motive before investigators establish one. We should not call someone a terrorist simply because social media has decided he is one or transform assumptions into facts because they fit a narrative. Those rules are not political correctness. They are journalism.
There is another rule that matters just as much: Tell people what happened.
Reuters published a story Wednesday under the headline: “A pilot brawl, then a rapid descent: passengers recount chaos on Flydubai flight.”
A brawl? A brawl is two people throwing punches at a bar. This was a passenger aircraft carrying more than 170 people in which, according to officials and witnesses, one pilot stabbed another as the aircraft plunged from cruising altitude. Those words are not interchangeable.
Again, I understand how those words get there. Breaking news is messy. A producer is calling sources, a reporter is trying to confirm details, authorities have released little, social media is racing ahead, and an editor needs a headline now.
There is an enormous difference between what everyone suspects and what a newsroom can publish. Restraint should prevent us from adding facts. It should not require us to subtract the ones we already have.
That distinction matters because, for millions of people, the headline is the story. It is the push notification, the screenshot on Instagram, the post on X, or the Google result they read without clicking. A handful of words can shape someone’s understanding before he or she ever encounters the reporting beneath them.
Consider the difference between “Fight between pilots forces emergency landing” and “One pilot stabs another as passengers intervene on plunging aircraft.” Neither declares a motive or calls the incident terrorism. Yet they leave the reader with profoundly different understandings of what occurred.
There is another layer beyond the headline. Watching coverage of the flight, I saw a network bring a pilot into a simulator to explain how an aircraft could survive such a dramatic descent and still land safely. As he walked through the mechanics of what could have happened, his analysis also introduced an element of doubt about some of the details being reported. His questions may have been entirely legitimate, and producers may not have known what his conclusions would be. That is part of live television. Yet it is a reminder that a story is shaped not only by headlines, but by anchors, chyrons, and the experts we choose to help audiences interpret what happened.
Each decision may be completely defensible on its own. Together, they can create an impression that no individual journalist necessarily intended.
That is where I think journalism has developed a problem. We are so frightened of saying too much that sometimes we say too little, and audiences notice. They notice when a violent attack becomes an “incident” or when the most extraordinary fact somehow disappears between the reporter’s notebook and the headline.
That does not mean a reporter intended to minimize it. Most journalists I have worked with are trying to get an extraordinarily difficult job right under enormous time pressure.
Wednesday’s flight also illustrates something else: The passengers were not passive characters. According to accounts from the aircraft, passengers and crew rushed the cockpit and subdued the attacker. Ordinary passengers realized something catastrophic was happening and moved toward the danger rather than away from it.
Imagine surviving that and then seeing your experience reduced to a “pilot brawl.”
This is bigger than one flight and one headline. It is about how journalism describes reality at a moment when trust in the institution is already fragile. “Attack” means something different from “altercation.” “Stabbing” means something different from “fight.”
Precision is not sensationalism. Sometimes precision means resisting the temptation to make a story sound more dramatic than the evidence supports. Sometimes it requires the opposite: having the courage to describe something as seriously as the facts demand.
I believe deeply in journalism. I know the impossible decisions that get made in minutes. I know why responsible reporters use “alleged,” “according to authorities,” and “investigators have not established a motive.” We should. Those words protect the integrity of our profession.
Caution, however, cannot become a euphemism. When readers can see that something terrifying happened and the headline makes it sound ordinary, they may not conclude that journalism is being careful. They may conclude that journalism is hiding something.
The answer is not louder journalism. It is more precise journalism. Say what we know. Say what we don’t know. Attribute what authorities allege. Correct what turns out to be wrong.
HEROES JUST STOPPED A HIJACKING. MAMDANI CAN’T EVEN DEFINE ANTISEMITISM
And when more than 170 people survive an aircraft plunging from the sky after passengers and crew overpower a man accused of stabbing the captain and attempting to crash their plane, don’t be afraid to tell readers exactly that.
They can handle the truth. Our headlines should too.
Ariella Noveck is a journalist specializing in antisemitism and Middle East affairs, with extensive experience covering Jewish communities worldwide. She can be followed on X and Instagram @AriellaNoveck.