After diving headfirst into speculation that a Wednesday afternoon explosion at the New York-Canada border was an “attempted terrorist attack,” Fox News reversed course with correspondent Alexis McAdams having to walk back her reporting based on “high-level police sources.”
A deadly vehicle crash at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls led to immediate closures of all four bridges between Canada and the United States on the busiest travel day of the year. Traveling at a high rate of speed, a vehicle reportedly entering the bridge on the U.S. side became airborne after hitting a curb, exploding when it impacted a checkpoint structure, law enforcement officials said.
While authorities investigated whether the crash was deliberate, and the incident initially created a heightened state of alert, officials noted there were no secondary incendiary or explosive devices found among the vehicle’s remains.
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And in a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stated that there was “no indication” the crash was an act of terrorism. Reuters reported that the explosion was “likely caused by a reckless driver” based on early assessments of the scene.
But in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Fox News went all-in on depicting the fiery crash as a likely terror attack—even going so far as to openly speculate whether the explosion was part of a coordinated series of attacks related to either the war in Gaza or illegal immigration.
It would appear the conservative cable giant felt confident to go down this path due to McAdams’ reporting on the incident. “High level police sources tell me this is an attempted terrorist attack,” she tweeted early Wednesday afternoon. “Sources say the car was full of explosives. Both men inside dead.”
McAdams also claimed on-air, citing these sources, that the vehicle had been stopped at an initial checkpoint at the bridge and told to move to a secondary security area, which is where the explosion occurred. Furthermore, she said, her sources claimed officials were looking for a second vehicle that may have also been involved.
Following McAdams’ report, Fox News anchor John Roberts brought up the incident while interviewing GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, wondering without any evidence whether immigrants may have been responsible for the supposed attack.
“We don’t know how long the people who perpetrated this attack have been in this country,” Roberts declared. “Did they recently come across? Did they come into the country legally? Did they come across illegally and claim asylum? Were they some of the nearly one million got-aways who’ve come into this country? Were they radicalized in this country? Were they radicalized at all? Did they come into the country that way? There’s so many questions yet to be answered.”
A short time later, Roberts and co-anchor Gillian Turner welcomed former Trump administration official Morgan Ortagus, who linked the incident to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and invoked the jihadist group ISIS.
“That may be what happens today,” Ortagus asserted. “We were talking about the social media aspect of this and what terror groups are able to do. Remember during the second term of the Obama administration, when ISIS had a physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and ISIS was very sophisticated at that point, recruiting young people from around the world to come to the physical caliphate to fight with them. They put out slick videos.”
The following hour, the Fox News speculation went into overdrive.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki, for instance, expressed concern that there could soon be similar “attacks” across the country, noting how there was more than one target in the 9/11 terror attacks. Israeli special ops veteran Aaron Cohen suggested the crash was part of a “systematic global jihad with everybody who stands with Hamas’ ideology.”
Eventually, with other media outlets reporting that there were no explosives in the vehicle and that the crash was the result of reckless driving, McAdams began walking back her story, saying “minute-by-minute” things were changing and it was unknown whether the car was actually packed with explosives.
“High-level police sources say bomb techs on the scene immediately alerted all authorities that this was an attempted terror attack because they had never seen a car explosion with a debris field like that before and believed there were several explosives in the car,” McAdams later tweeted. “All government buildings were evacuated, the bridge was closed, and the airport had heightened security. Also, authorities checked all cars near the airport. Looking in the trunk and back seats. A police source says those are all steps that follow what they believed to be a terror attack.”
She finally acknowledged on-air during the 4 p.m. hour that law enforcement officials didn’t believe that the incident was terrorism.
“I’m told this was a stolen vehicle, two men now dead that tried to avoid border patrol at the crash and causing a massive explosion,” she said, adding: “That’s what happens with breaking news. As of now, they walked back it was a possible terrorist attack but have never seen a car explode in that way.”
In the end, after the right-wing network spent two hours running on-air graphics about an “attempted terror attack” at the border, Fox News quietly switched the chyron to read: “Motive Unclear in Incident at NY-Canada Border.”
