CNN is holding Fox News responsible for using the New Orleans terror attack to warp "the political dialogue" over migrants and crime.
Anchor Jim Sciutto posted a link to X Thursday that clicked through to "an important cautionary tale" from colleague Brian Stelter about fake news.
"An erroneous early Fox News report about the New Orleans terror attack is warping the political dialogue in the aftermath of the deadly rampage," Stelter wrote. "The false report from Fox, which was attributed to anonymous sources, confused the public – and evidently President-elect Donald Trump too."
After news broke of the New Year's Eve terror attack that killed at least 15 and injured 35, President-elect Donald Trump posted to social media, “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. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before."
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Stelter wrote, "Ironically, Trump's original statement used the New Orleans attack to say that he was right and the "Fake News Media" was wrong about the threat posed by illegal immigration. If he had waited a couple hours to react, he would have learned that the suspect was a US citizen. A Fox spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the misreporting."
Stelter continued, "Overnight, Trump continued to post messages on Truth Social assailing 'open borders.' After a related segment on Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Trump wrote, 'I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.'
Although the FBI confirmed Thursday that the suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, was a U.S. citizen, "Republican lawmakers on Fox have also continued to bring up the southern border during the network’s segments about the New Orleans attack, even though there is no known link," Stelter wrote.
He added, "A Fox spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the misreporting."
