Selective Outrage In Global Aviation Coverage Exposes Media Bias
By Gajanan Khergamker
More than 9,000 domestic U.S. flights cancelled or delayed in the span of a single Saturday evening is not a footnote in aviation data. It is a charge sheet. It exposes the fragility of a system that advertises scale, efficiency and technological superiority, but falters predictably each time seasonal weather arrives on schedule.
FlightAware’s data leaves little room for euphemism. The disruption was concentrated around the New York aviation triad. John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International Airport became bottlenecks in an airspace already operating without slack. These were not remote airports grappling with aberrant conditions. These were America’s most prestigious gateways, fortified by capital, experience and redundancy. The failure was not localised. It was structural and nationwide.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
Now set this beside the treatment accorded to India’s recent IndiGo delays by the global media ecosystem.
Those delays travelled faster than the aircraft themselves. They crossed borders, gathered moral freight and were repackaged as proof of regulatory failure, institutional decay and the presumed inevitability of disorder in Indian aviation. Headlines complied readily. Studio panels performed concern. Columns adopted the familiar tone of weary diagnosis. The subtext was routine. When India falters, it must reveal pathology. When India delays, it must reflect systemic rot. An airline disruption is never just operational. It must become allegorical.
The inconvenient truth is that the IndiGo delays coincided with an extraordinary phase of global aviation disruption, not Indian aberration. On 28 December 2025, thousands of passengers across Asia were stranded as more than 55 flights were cancelled and over 2,000 delayed across Singapore, China, Japan, the UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia and India. Airlines with unassailable reputations were equally affected. AirAsia, Emirates, ANA, Japan Airlines, Flydubai and IndiGo found themselves subject to the same triad of pressure points. Weather volatility, airspace congestion and cascading scheduling failures showed no respect for geography or branding.
This was never an Indian story. It was an industry-wide story.
Coverage chose otherwise.
IndiGo’s delays were carefully extracted from the wider regional breakdown and presented as an Indian problem demanding explanation. Context was excised. Comparisons were avoided. At precisely the moment when Asia-Pacific air corridors were seizing up across jurisdictions, the narrative narrowed its gaze to India, as if disruption were cultural rather than systemic.
Now return to the American episode. Over 9,000 domestic flights disrupted in a single evening constitutes aviation paralysis by any defensible standard. It laid bare saturated airspace, brittle scheduling models, staffing shortfalls and an industry engineered without buffers. These are not meteorological inconveniences. These are governance questions.
Coverage, however, remains transient and indulgent.
This episode will not be elevated into a national reckoning. It will not be interrogated as evidence of institutional fatigue. It will not be pressed into service as a metaphor for American decline. It will be processed as weather, absolved by familiarity, and forgotten by design.
The asymmetry is deliberate. It is editorial muscle memory, cultivated over decades. Disruption in the Global South is personalised, moralised and magnified. Disruption in the Global North is depersonalised, contextualised and softened. Snow is framed as inevitability. Fog in India is framed as mismanagement. The distinction has little to do with facts and everything to do with framing.
IndiGo’s delays were real. Passenger inconvenience was undeniable. Scrutiny was legitimate. What followed, however, was not scrutiny but spectacle. The airline became a symbol. The country became the accused. No serious attempt was made to situate the episode within global aviation realities or to ask how frequently comparable disruptions occur elsewhere, and how leniently they are treated.
No opinion columns will question the inherent reliability of American aviation. No prolonged debate will examine U.S. regulatory competence on the back of one paralysed evening. No one will convert 9,000 delayed flights into a national metaphor. Silence will suffice.
This is the operational core of fake news. Not fabrication, but selection. Not lies, but emphasis. Not what is reported, but what is allowed to persist. Bias today is measured less by distortion than by duration. Some failures are curated to echo. Others are designed to evaporate.
Selective coverage predates algorithms and outrage cycles. It resides in editorial judgment about where outrage is warranted and where indulgence is permissible. It decides who must endlessly justify failure and who is entitled to circumstance. Within that hierarchy, India continues to be assessed under harsher light.
A country that moves millions daily through some of the densest air corridors in the world is afforded no margin for error. A country whose aviation system stalls year after year under predictable winter stress is granted habitual absolution. This is not journalism as interrogation. It is journalism as inheritance.
If fake news is the disease, selective silence is its most efficient vector. It neither shouts nor trends. It simply ensures that certain failures never acquire consequence, while others are condemned to perpetual recall.
The IndiGo delays will be remembered, cited and recycled. The American aviation breakdown will be filed away beneath the next weather bulletin. No one will speak of it. Conveniently. And in that convenience lies the most enduring bias of all.
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