United flight turns around after passenger texts hijack threat

🗞️ Story file #995

United flight turns around after passenger texts hijack threat

Oct 26, 7 PM ET to Oct 28, 6 AM ET

8outlets carried it
🫏3 · 1 · 4🐘left · center · right
1.5 dayson the front pages
8front pages at once, at its peak
26 sof TV captions

👣 How this story traveled: from the front pages that broke it, out through TV, radio and the shows, into what people retold and what fact-checkers examined, and on into the saga it is part of. Everything here is matched to the story by our tools, so a link can be wrong; the trackers' pages say how each is made.

Oct 26, 7 PM ETfirst on a front page: HuffPost
Oct 27, 10 AM ETpeak: on 8 front pages
Oct 27, 10 AM ETfirst on TV: Fox News

the front pages that ran it, hour by hour

Front pages carrying it at each hourly run, Oct 26, 7 PM to Oct 28, 6 AM ET (peak 8), by the outlets' lean: left · center · right

Who carried it and when: each outlet in the order it picked the story up, a bar for each headline from when we first saw it on the front page to when we last did, in the outlet's lean color (dashed: not rated); a dot marks a new headline. Beneath, its captions on TV, the radio newscasts that carried it (bigger: the lead) and when people were found retelling it. Hover for details.

📡 wire copy: 1 outlet ran the AP headline nearly word for word (HuffPost)

📌 linked by aggregators: Google News

💬 quoted: “hijack” 3 “Crash ur row only” “hijacking threat” “Hijack”

🗣️ only one side says: 🫏 passenger allegedly 🐘 flight attendant spots 🐘 passenger's phone 🐘 united airlines flight

✏️ 2 outlets ran more than one headline on it (reworded, or a follow-up)

New York Post (2 wordings): “United flight forced to turn around midair after crew member spotted horrifying text on passenger’s phone” → “United passenger who forced Newark-bound flight to return to Vegas over ‘hijacking threat’ has boozy explanation”
News Nation (2 wordings): “United flight forced to turn back after crew notices hijacking text” → “United 'hijack' text scare forces plane to turn back”

Every outlet's first headline (8), left to right by AllSides rating