The seriousness of last weeks FlyDubai attack became clear almost immediately. Within little more than an hour of the story breaking, we had eyewitness accounts of the copilot stabbing the pilot and taking control of the plane, a 7700 “emergency” squawk, and a 7500 “hijacking” squawk. We knew the planed had dropped 17000 feet in less than a minute and had been landed by a different set of pilots who happened to be aboard. As the day went on, the details became clearer. The BBC, however, chose to first minimise the incident, then cast doubt on reports on the basis that they came from Israelis, and finally to offer its own “context” which offered political motive, despite all earlier caution.
The BBC doesn’t use the word terrorist without attribution, we know this, whether we agree with it or not. But when a hijacking is reduced to first a fight, and then an altercation, the argument that this is simply journalistic caution and impartiality takes its own 17000ft nose dive.
The BBC breaking news X feed lead with the headline “Israel bound flight diverted after fight between pilots” which was quickly community noted to include the glaring lack of context. That our national broadcaster is being community noted at all should be a matter of scandal but the problems continued as the day unfolded.
By around 12pm, Jon Donnison appeared on the BBC News channel and asserted that this was not a hijacking but a “remarkable incident”:
“Well as we get more details, this does turn out to have been a quite remarkable incident. So initially we heard reports that this flight, which was carrying around 170 passengers back to Tel Aviv, had been hijacked. And apparently a signal had come from the plane alerting the airports and the air traffic control that it had been hijacked. Now that turns out not to have been the case, but what we’ve learned from passengers who’ve got off the plane is that there was a fight between the pilot and the co-pilot. Some reports that one of them was stabbed.”
However by 1pm, on Radio 4’s flagship World at One programme that had to be walked back and yet still bizarrely caveated:
“what now looks a real possibility that this was not an attempted hijacking by the passengers, but by one of the pilots”
And yet by 2.45pm on BBC News Kasia Madera appeared to still be minimising the incident as a plane:
“forced to land in Saudi Arabia after a serious altercation between the two pilots.”
Even as she reported the comments of Prime Minister Netanyahu that:
“one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot and apparently tried to crash the plane with its passengers on board”
The attempt at mass murder subsumed into an “altercation” between two pilots, in stark contrast to the reports from the Israeli prime minister himself.
Throughout the day, the BBC repeatedly appeared to try and cast doubt on Israeli reports. On BBC News TV at around 12.30pm the astonishing caveat:
“Now just stressing that this is according to Israeli officials, we haven’t verified this yet.”
appeared to counterweight information audiences were receiving from Israeli officials. On the website, Israeli civilian eye witness accounts received the caveat:
“BBC News has not been able to verify their accounts.”
Even by the 6 O’clock news that evening when the details were circulating freely:
“These are all details which need to be verified.”
And on multiple headline bulletins throughout the day the incident was framed through the BBC’s favourite bogeyman:
“Israel’s far right national Security Minister, Ben-Gvir, says that an Israel bound flight which landed in Saudi Arabia, was due to a terrorist who wanted to crash the plane and kill Israelis.”
Which, a cynic may argue, looks like an attempt to delegitimise the report by framing it through the “far right” as if Ben Gvir was the only Israeli making the claim.
Is all this just a zealous commitment to caution? It would seem not, given their original website reporting needed to be corrected immediately as journalists Moore and Sullivan appeared to try to create more ambiguity around the incident by misrepresenting some of Netanyahu’s earliest comments:
“This article originally reported that Netanyahu had said that it was too early to say what the attacker’s motivation was. Netanyahu’s comments to Fox News concerned it being too early to say if Iran was involved.”
It would also be remiss not to point out that eyewitness reports from Palestinians do not receive the same caveats and relentless commitment to ambiguity. In fact, on the very same day a heart wrenching video about a little girl in Gaza appeared on the website reporting:
“Witnesses say her tent in al-Mawasi camp was hit by a strike from an Israeli helicopter”
We are not told whether the BBC is able to verify those reports.
While the BBC worked so hard to make audiences aware of the things it wanted them to be unsure of it did manage to convey certainty in other areas. Despite over reporting Netanyahu’s comments on motive the BBC felt confidently able to supply its own. At around 12:45 PM:
“The significance of this is incredibly large given what is happening across the Middle East right now as we see Israel and the US involved in a war against Iran, as we see disruption as Israel continues its assault upon Gaza as well, a ceasefire of sorts holding. But we know the situation on the ground devastating”
How did the BBC manage to verify a connection to what it calls Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza when it had taken such pains to tell audiences it couldn’t verify anything about the attack?
The 6 O’clock news went further:
“All of this, the context, you can’t ignore that this is a region in which there has been a heightened conflict for three years”
“You can’t ignore” is explicitly telling the BBC audience that this incident happened in the context of the war in Gaza. However that very same news report reduced the attack to:
“A pilot has been arrested, after terrifying scenes on board a flight to Israel this morning, that started with an altercation in the cockpit.”
So why is the BBC confidently asserting that this “altercation” between pilots was about Gaza? Are they suggesting the pilots quarelled about Gaza? How has that been verified when all the eyewitness reports are Israeli and therefore apparently untrustworthy?
The BBC decided which facts it wanted its audience to consider solid and which it did not. It minimised the attack itself to a “fight” and “altercation”, it sowed doubt around all reports whether civilian or official that came from Israelis, and yet it managed to confidently assert that this event was significantly related to the war in Gaza.
The entire days reporting could be reduced to “It didn’t happen, but if it did, they probably deserved it”.
The BBC continues to crash its own standards in pursuit of the demonisation of Israel.