31 Jan 2017 2:51 pm
The Suspected Quebec City Mosque Attacker Was a Right-Wing Troll and Trump Fan, But Fox News and the White House quickly pointed toward Islamic terrorism.
Late Monday, Canadian authorities charged Alexandre Bissonnette, a white 27-year-old university student, with multiple counts of murder for an attack on a mosque in Quebec City that left six dead and many others injured. According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the 27-year-old Bissonnette "was known in the city's activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump."
With every mass shooting, the initial news is almost always riddled with inaccuracies misidentification is common, and rarely is there more than one attacker.
By now this is very well-known in newsrooms.
Earlier on Monday, an additional suspect was reportedly in custody: a man of Moroccan origin.
Sure enough, Quebec officials soon clarified that this second person was considered a witness, not a suspect in the attack.
But the toothpaste was already out of the tube with Fox News, which had pushed the story in a particular direction:
The Fox story was updated to clarify that Bissonnette was the only suspect, but the above Fox tweets remain in circulation as of this post (JAN. 30, 2017 7:31 PM).