While Donald Trump works to destroy the FBI and the Department of Justice, he and his MAGA pals relied without question on Fox “News” false reporting on yesterday’s terrorist attack in New Orleans. It's a frightening portent of what may be coming.
In the aftermath of the deadly truck attack on New Year’s revelers in New Orleans early Wednesday morning, Fox News wrongly reported that the suspect had entered the U.S. from Mexico two days before.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz explains what happened:
At around 3:15 a.m., the driver of a pickup truck sped through a crowd of revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more before being killed in a shoot-out with police. The driver was later identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran born and raised in Texas who claimed to have joined ISIS.
But at 10:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday — before authorities had confirmed the suspect’s name — Fox aired an anonymously-sourced bombshell report claiming that he had crossed the border from Mexico earlier that week.
“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate, OK — so this is just coming into our newsroom now. This is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working their federal sources on this,” anchor Molly Line said. “According to their sources, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”
It's not clear which “federal sources” Jenkins and Spunt were working but I would bet they immediately went to sources at or with knowledge of the Texas border in the hope of finding that an immigrant had committed the violence. Border Czar-To-Be Who Can’t Wait To Put Children In “Halfway Houses,” and former Fox contributor Tom Homan, anyone? He could have been very helpful with contact information in between his Fox News hits.
Whatever sources Jenkins and Spunt “worked,” the info was wrong. It turned out that the truck had crossed the border in November, driven by somebody else, and that perpetrator Jabbar had rented the truck on December 30. Jabbar was a Texas-born U.S. citizen and an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan.
Media Matters has the deets on how Fox began walking back its false reporting.
But Donald Trump, the guy who claims he's uniquely equipped to lead the biggest, most powerful country in the world, didn’t bother to check any further sources, it seems. He didn’t even wait for more details from Fox News. Eight minutes after Fox’s first, erroneous report, he began using the fake news to boast about himself and to fear monger and demonize immigrants.
More from Media Matters:
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” he posted to his Truth Social platform at 10:48 a.m. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”
…
A few hours after that, as more information about the suspect came out, Spunt ended up in the curious position of correcting the false Trump claim that his own reporting had seemingly spurred. Spunt read the Truth Social statement during the 4 p.m. ET hour and commented, “Now, the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in his statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear, Molly and Brian, the suspect was born in the United States.”
The correction did nothing to deter Trump, who posted overnight that “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS” and blamed Democrats “for allowing this to happen to our Country.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter noted more of the damage done:
Some of Trump’s family members and political allies also immediately connected the attack to illegal immigration and cited Fox.
“Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote, sharing the Fox claim on X. “Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exclaimed.
…
References to Eagle Pass continued to spread across social media. Fox continued to stream a clip on its website of the incorrect information. “Some Republicans continued to beat the border drum well after Fox News retracted its initial report,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported.
Gertz correctly points out that this is a return to what he calls the Trump-Fox feedback loop that characterized his first term in office. In November, Gertz wrote:
It’s impossible to overstate how ridiculous — or dangerous — this Fox-Trump pipeline could be. At one point, after a Fox contributor turned to the camera and urged Trump to renounce his support for a bill, the president appeared to do so on Twitter, causing chaos on Capitol Hill. Later in his term, Trump put the full force of government behind a purported coronavirus “miracle cure” that he had seen touted on Fox but proved ineffective against the virus.
What makes this especially alarming now is that Trump and his billionaire handlers are planning to take a wrecking ball to our federal government. That includes the FBI, the Department of Justice, our national intelligence and our public health systems.
In other words, Fox News will give new meaning to the term “state news." I'd like to hope that the network, realizing its outsized role in a Musk/Trump/Vance administration, would take extra care in its reporting. But there is absolutely nothing to suggest that will happen.
You can watch Fox announce the false, but almost certainly sought-after, “news” that the New Orleans suspect entered the country from Mexico two days before the attack below, from Fox’s live coverage on January 1, 2025, via Media Matters.
(Top image via screen grab)
