When it comes to crisis events, a cautious pose is always the smart play for a news organization. You never want to get ahead of the story — to prioritize being first ahead of being right. The problem with modern news media, however, is that this caution is selective. A group of Israeli air travelers on a flight from Dubai to Israel thwarted an alleged hijacker last week, rescuing themselves and others from a potential 9/11-style attack. The assailant, the flight's co-pilot, repeatedly stabbed the captain in the chest.

The plane then dropped nearly 14,000 feet. During the attack, the captain was able, if only briefly, to broadcast a hijacking signal and unlock the cabin door. Passengers then stormed the cockpit and overwhelmed the assailant. Images of the incident were soon broadcast on television and social media, including photographs of bloodied passengers. Israeli officials quickly characterized the attack as terrorism. At 5:44 a.m. Eastern Time, Israel's Channel 14 posted video from the plane in which a passenger said they had taken “control of the terrorists." Roughly 30 minutes later, the New York Times characterized the attack this way: "A plane flying from Dubai to Israel was diverted after an altercation between the pilot and co-pilot, Israeli officials said."

Other outlets did the same, putting out vaguely worded breaking news alerts that badly undersold the gravity of the situation. Reuters specifically called the attack a "pilot brawl." This was several hours after an eyewitness had used the word "terrorist," the Israeli Prime Minister's Office announced it was "treating the incident as a terror attack in every respect," and Defense Minister Israel Katz described the event as "a jihadist terrorist attack."

The Times and Reuters were savaged online, accused of whitewashing what had happened thousands of feet in the air. The Times, for its part, put out an overly defensive response, saying from its official public relations account, "Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we're able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don't publish speculation or unverified information."

If only that were true. We shouldn’t scold the Times, Reuters, or others for playing it safe — reporting only what they could reasonably and confidently verify. We want our media to exercise restraint and act responsibly as a matter of habit, and especially for these types of events, when the stakes are so high. But the care shown on this foiled hijacking story could not contrast more sharply with the Western press's regular mishandling of allegations against Israel. The New York Times has, in particular, racked up a rather ignoble record in this area.

The Times was among the first in October 2023 to misreport that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing 500. Israel did no such thing. The rocket was misfired by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, according to a U.S. assessment, and it did not even hit the hospital. Rather, it struck a nearby parking lot. A New York Times editor's note later conceded that the early coverage relied too heavily on the say-so of Hamas. This is a repeated problem with Middle East coverage. After all, if you can't trust a medieval death cult, then whom can you trust?

The Times also claimed about two months into the war that Israel had killed more women and children than Russia had killed in Ukraine since February 2022. Shamefully, the Times sought to launder the claim through a supposedly independent third-party source — which, surprise, relied on Hamas figures. The report fell apart nearly immediately, partly because the Hamas-provided figures were unverified and partly because the cited death toll was actually lower than those from other conflicts.

Later, the Times claimed that Gaza deaths had surpassed “any Arab loss in wars in past 40 years.”This was also false, and the paper eventually issued a correction. The Times also published a front-page photo of a Palestinian child with cerebral palsy and presented him as the victim of an Israeli-induced famine, captioning him as born healthy and recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. The paper later acknowledged that it had failed to verify the child’s medical condition before publication.

Then, of course, there were the rape dogs. The claim that Israeli police canines are trained to rape Palestinian prisoners appeared in a May 2026 opinion article by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Tellingly, no one on the news side of the Times has ever been able to corroborate that story. Executive editor Joseph Kahn later said he probably would not have published the piece in the news pages. It is still profoundly unsettling that the paper's opinion editors would run such an implausible claim without verification.

It is good, heartening even, that the Times handled last week's foiled hijacking with care and caution, waiting for the full picture to emerge before reporting anything definitive. That is the bare minimum of responsible journalism. But where is this same seriousness when the allegations are directed at Israel? It seems no claim is too stupid, outrageous, or ridiculous to make its way into the Times, so long as it is aimed at Israel.

When the Times says it does not "publish speculation or unverified information," that doesn't seem to apply to Hamas's cooked numbers and absurd claims, or to its unverified allegations of hospital bombings. And does this standard of caution apply to the Times opinion desk? If so, Kristof and his editors have some explaining to do. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.