PMO's public call-out on Fox News mosque error is new-era diplomacy: experts

It was an unprecedented rebuke and a very public one. But was it the right move?

Fox News apologized and corrected a tweet that wrongly said the suspect in the Quebec City mosque shooting was of Moroccan descent, but only after the prime minister’s press secretary, Kate Purchase, very publicly called out the news agency on Twitter.

Purchase told iPolitics she tried privately to get the error corrected prior to posting the letter publicly.

Though some media watchers suspect the move wasn’t so much a polite request to correct an error as it was a diplomatic subtweet to a Trump-sympathetic news agency about the new U.S. administration’s more inflammatory policies.

National Post columnist Andrew Coyne said it was not the federal government’s job to correct the misinformation.

“The Fox tweet was inaccurate. But not sure we need or want the government to correct it. Not its job, and not a good precedent,” he wrote on Twitter.

But Mohamed Fahmy, the Canadian jailed in Egypt for his work as a journalist there, says the rare intervention by the PMO was needed.

One man initially arrested at the scene was later identified by police as a witness but not before he was named a suspect in several media reports. Fahmy himself repeated the misinformation then corrected it, as many did.

“People picked up on it, in the streets of Cairo and in the Middle East and they were very angry when they found out that this man was a person helping rather than an assailant,” he told Yahoo Canada News in an interview as he boarded a flight home to Canada. He was in Egypt when the shooting took place.

The series of events played into a dangerous narrative and the Fox News error — left to fester — was a “dangerous mistake,” he said.

The PMO letter sent a larger message, he said.

“It is unconventional but we are now in extremely sensitive and dangerous times that even one piece of inaccurate news can cause huge havoc worldwide,” Fahmy said.

The Quebec City shooting and the immigration order in the U.S. are news around the world, including in the Middle East, Fahmy said.

“Everyone is watching Canada to see what we’re going to do,” he said.

“Being rational and being protective of our values, the way Mr. Trudeau has presented, is a great example.”

With denunciations of Trump’s refugee order from world leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s foreign minister and even U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, pressure has been mounting on Trudeau to take a stand.

Veronica Kitchen, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and expert in Canada-U.S. relations, said the open letter may have been an “unusual” way for the prime minister’s office to subtly do so.

“I do think it is notable that while many of Canada’s allies have now spoke out quite explicitly against the executive order, Trudeau hasn’t,” Kitchen told Yahoo Canada News. “Not in a really explicit way.”

Addressing the factual error by Fox News “could potentially be a way of criticizing Trump without actually coming out and denouncing the executive order, without denouncing any attempts by Trump to capitalize on the terrorist incident in Quebec city,” she said.

Because criticizing the U.S. administration has never been easy for Canada, she said.

“Canada has a long tradition of ‘quiet diplomacy’ with the United States,” Kitchen said. “Because of the need to preserve the trade relationship, it’s difficult for Canada to be openly critical of American policies in way that may cause a reaction that is detrimental to Canadian interests.

“It’s a fairly safe way of speaking out.”

Fox News has deleted the erroneous tweet and the site’s managing director issued a statement saying the agency regrets the error.