Fox News issued an unusual on-air apology on Saturday night for having allowed its anchors and guests to repeat the false claim that there are Muslim-only “no-go zones” in European countries like England and France that are not under the control of the state and are ruled according to Shariah law.
The statement was referred to as “a correction” by the Fox Report host Julie Banderas, who said that “over the course of this last week, we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France.”
A Fox News correction for reports that there are "no-go zones" off-limits to non-Muslims in Europe. Fox News, via YouTubeFox News Beats a Retreat After Gaffes About Islam
“Now this applies especially to discussions of so-called no-go zones, areas where non-Muslims allegedly are not allowed in and police supposedly won’t go,” Ms. Banderas continued. “To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion that there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.”
The claim that such areas existed attracted widespread attention, and a wave of online derision, last weekend when Steve Emerson, a self-described expert on Islamist terrorism, told the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that parts of France and the entire English city of Birmingham “are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.” Mr. Emerson said such areas also included parts of London, Sweden and Germany, and he claimed, “You basically have zones where Shariah courts were set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where the police don’t go in, and where it’s basically a separate country almost, a country within a country.”
Although Mr. Emerson was shamed into issuing a public apology to the people of Britain for what he called “sloppy research that had not been fact-checked” after a campaign of ridicule from British Twitter users, the news channel’s press office initially made no apology, and argued that it was inaccurate to call this an error by a “Fox News pundit,” since he was not a member of its staff.
A BBC interview with Steve Emerson, a self-declared expert on terrorism who is a frequent guest on Fox News. BBC News, via YouTube
Ms. Pirro also issued a brief apology for not correcting Mr. Emerson last weekend.
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro apologized Saturday for not correcting a guest's claim that Birmingham, England is entirely Muslim. Fox News, via YouTube
The broader apology on Saturday, read by Ms. Banderas, came after a week of pressure from a French television host, Yann Barthès, whose comedic news program “Le Petit Journal,” found example after example of the claim being made again and again by anchors and guests on other Fox News programs.
Mr. Barthès even sent a crew to several areas of Paris identified on a map by Fox as “no-go zones” to ask residents if their neighborhoods really did resemble Iraq and Afghanistan, as a guest on “Fox & Friends” had suggested.
French viewers of “Le Petit Journal” were also encouraged to flood the inboxes of Fox News executives, demanding an apology.
Though Mr. Emerson refused to identify the source of his incorrect information about autonomous, Muslim-ruled areas of Europe to a BBC interviewer, the Twitter feed of his Investigative Project on Terrorismappears to offer some clues.
Two days later, when France’s ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, took issue with Mr. Emerson’s claims on Twitter, his organization cited a French government list of disadvantaged neighborhoods, known as “Sensitive Urban Zones,” and a report on France from Russian state television, which is not known for its objective assessment of living conditions in the West.
The French Interior Ministry list of 751 disadvantaged urban areas in need of extra economic and social help cited by Mr. Emerson’s group is not new; it was created in 1996 in accordance with an urban renewal law. A decade later, in 2006, the conservative commentator Daniel Pipes, a self-declared watchdog of militant Islam, first drew attention to it in a blog post headlined, “The 751 No-Go Zones of France.” In that post, Mr. Pipes insisted that this was proof of “places in France that the French state does not fully control.”
As the term was repeated again and again on Fox News after the Paris attacks, Mr. Araud said that the interpretation of this document promoted by Mr. Pipes and Mr. Emerson was a “ridiculous” distortion.
In recent days, the ambassador, who controls his own Twitter account and makes a point of trying to correct the false information of critics he encounters on the social networks, continued his perhaps quixotic attempt to tweet some sense into America’s cable news channels.
By Sunday, however, Mr. Araud was at least able to celebrate a minor victory for the facts, by pointing to the apology from Fox News.
