Right-wing U.S. media covered fiction as fact: A non-existent terrorist attack from Canada at Rainbow Bridge

For a few hours Wednesday afternoon,Canada appeared to be staring down the barrel of an unwelcome and potentially painful international crisis.

News reports were awash in misinformation following an explosion at the Canada-U.S. border crossing at Rainbow Bridge near Niagara Falls.

Some U.S. media began describing it as a terrorist explosion, caused by a vehicle entering from Canada.

Every element of that preceding sentence was dispelled within hours as flat-out wrong.

There was no attack from Canada; the incident occurred entirely on U.S. soil; in fact, authorities don’t believe it was a terrorist attack at all.

That didn’t stop a candidate for president of the United States from appearing on Fox News to promote an aspect of his platform: Building a border wall with Canada.

“I have been sounding the alarm bell about the northern border for a long time,” said Vivek Ramaswamy during a lengthy interview about an incident he did not witness, was not a subject-matter expert on, and had no insight into.

“This is a mounting crisis. We’re ignoring it.”

The Republican candidate’s argument for a border wall involves a spike in fentanyl seizures at the Canadian border. Left unsaid by him: seizures near Canada amount to approximately 0.0074 per cent of the fentanyl seized by U.S. border officials this year — or about one kilo at the northern border out of the 12 tonnes seized overall.

Scrutiny shifted swiftly to Canada’s immigration system.

On Fox News, talking heads were talking about their porous borders, and also about Canada’s allegedly porous immigration system.

“It is untenable to let millions of people into this country when we don’t know who they are,” said former State Department official Morgan Ortagus.

“Similarly, there have been people hawkish on immigration who have not been comfortable with Canada’s vetting system.”

One host on Fox News expressed astonishment that this had suddenly become the biggest story in the country, supplanting the hostage release in Gaza.

Reopening old wounds for Canada

The afternoon of speculation rekindled rough memories for Canada from the 9/11 era, where American fears of cross-border terrorism resulted in a long-term tightening of the border.

Incorrect reports that the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001 entered from Canada compounded fears fuelled by the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

Canadian diplomats in Washington spent years trying to dispel that canard, as it had created a real-world impact on Canada’s economy and its major international border.

On Fox News, one anchor was well aware of this history: network host John Roberts, a Canadian, said it wasn’t clear what exactly had happened Wednesday.

Roberts asked: “Is this foreign-born terrorism? Is it domestic terrorism? We don’t know.”

He did note, accurately, that, a year and a half before the Sept. 11 attacks, a would-be terrorist bomber, Ahmed Ressam, was stopped at the border entering from Canada.

Meanwhile, on social media, far-right Arizona politician Kari Lake called this a terrorist attack caused by Joe Biden’s open border policies. Sen. Ted Cruz also called it a terrorist attack.

Authorities closed access to the Rainbow Bridge crossing after an incident, as seen from Niagara Falls, Ont. (Tara Walton/Reuters)

What the White House told Canadian officials

By mid-afternoon, sources in the Canadian government told CBC News they were quite confident the vehicle had not entered from Canada.

Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc spoke with his U.S. counterpart Alejandro Mayorkas; Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez spoke with his U.S. counterpart Pete Buttigieg.

Canada’s ambassador to Washington talked to White House officials.

Regardless of the media chatter, Kirsten Hillman said the professionals in the U.S. government never pointed an accusatory finger at Canada, or suggested a Canadian-originated attack: “That was never suggested in the conversations we had.”

Meanwhile, the narrative was shifting.

Debris is scattered inside the customs plaza at the Rainbow Bridge border crossing, Wednesday in Niagara Falls, N.Y. (Derek Gee/The Buffalo News via AP)

‘It was going towards Canada’

It began with local eyewitness accounts that sounded inconsistent with the idea of a terrorist attack originating from Canada.

One man told the Niagara Falls-area NBC affiliate that he saw what happened while walking down Main Street.

He said a car was barrelling ahead at about 160 kilometres per hour, swerved around the car in front of it, slammed into a fence at the U.S. customs facility, then went flying before it erupted in midair.

“It was a ball of fire – 30, 40 feet high. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, adding: “It was going towards Canada.”

Another witness, Rickie Wilson, told journalists in Niagara Falls, N.Y., a similar story: “I seen something airborne. I first thought it was an airplane,” he said.

Smoke rises over border in Niagara Falls, N.Y., on Wednesday after an explosion. (Reuters)

New York State Senator Robert Ortt was, unlike some of his federal counterparts, urging caution before drawing any hasty conclusions.

Ortt told CBC News that people understandably draw those conclusions when they hear about an explosion, at this moment, at a border checkpoint.

“You can imagine where a lot of Americans and, I’m sure, a lot of Canadians – where their minds go. Right? And what conclusions they come to,” said Ortt, a Republican.

But he added that the briefings he’d been given made him skeptical about the early media narrative: “I’ve been told enough that it gives me caution.”

A vehicle burns at the Rainbow Bridge U.S. border crossing with Canada, in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in a still image from a video. (Courtesy Saleman Alwishah via Reuters)

One terrorism expert, a Canadian living in the U.S., told CBC News that, given events in the Middle East, she’s been worrying a lot about domestic incidents, and originally thought this might be one.

But there was something in the images spreading online, said Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University, that would have been unusual for a terrorist attack: the absence of a blast crater.

“The hole is too small,” said Bloom in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

Indeed, the vehicle was incinerated so violently that its pieces of debris had spread across 13 or 14 customs booths, said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

“There is nothing left,” Hochul said.

She added, with the caveat that the investigation is ongoing, that the driver was a local individual. From western New York.

Also, she said: “There is no sign of terrorist activity.”

By this point, the headlines that had been appearing all afternoon on Fox News had been adjusted.

Gone were the screen headlines referring to a “terror attack,” eventually replaced by the more mundane: “Motive unclear in incident at NY-Canada border.”

Whoops.