Two men were ejected from a JetBlue flight Thursday for reportedly harassing Ivanka Trump and her three children.
We know about the alleged incident because one of the men tweeted about it in real-time, and JetBlue confirmed in a statement that there was indeed a “conflict” aboard one of its planes.
But despite the airline’s statement, and the fact that one of the men involved specifically used the word “harass,” some headlines have sanitized the reported incident to the point where it’s basically a story about nothing.
Here is what Twitter user and Hunter College professor Matthew Lasner tweeted Thursday morning about his husband: “Ivanka and [her husband Jared Kushner] at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them. #banalityofevil.”
He then tweeted picture of Trump’s daughter, with the caption, “Ivanka just before [JetBlue] kicked us off our flight when a flt attendant overheard my husband expressing displeasure about flying w/ Trumps.”
“Ivanka and Jared on our flight. My husband expressed displeasure in a calm tone, JetBlue staff overheard, and they kicked us off the plane,” he concluded.
Lasner later deleted the tweets, and he appears to have suspended his Twitter account altogether following the incident.
JetBlue later put out a statement reading, “The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”
What’s really remarkable here is that even though media’s coverage of the incident has centered almost entirely on Lasner’s say-so, many headlines have omitted any sort of allusion to his own use of the word “harass.”
From the Associated Press: “Man says he and husband removed from JetBlue flight after ‘expressing displeasure’ that Ivanka Trump was aboard.”
From Yahoo News: “Man kicked off JetBlue flight for questioning why Ivanka Trump was on it.”
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Passengers kicked off flight after run-in with Ivanka Trump.”
From the Washington Post: “Passenger who confronted Ivanka Trump gets kicked off Jet Blue flight.”
From CNN: “JetBlue forced a man off a flight after an apparent incident involving Ivanka Trump and her husband.”
It goes on like that.
There’s a difference between playing it safe when there’s a shortage of information and sanitizing a story completely of its most newsworthy details.
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This post has been updated.
