White House Lists 78 'Underreported' Terror Attacks

It includes San Bernardino, Paris
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 7, 2017 5:27 AM CST
White House Releases List of 'Underreported' Terror Attacks
In this Monday photo, US President Donald Trump salutes a Marines honor guard as he disembarks from Marine One upon arrival at the White House in Washington.   (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

President Trump accused the "very, very dishonest press" Monday of not wanting to report ISIS attacks in Europe. "They have their reasons, you understand that," he said, speaking to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the headquarters of US Central Command. The White House later released a list of 78 terror attacks it claimed did not get the media attention they deserved. The incidents, however, included extensively reported attacks like the San Bernardino mass shooting, the Orlando nightclub attack, and the Paris Bataclan attack, reports NPR, which has the list in full. A roundup of coverage:

  • Sean Spicer said Monday that Trump really meant that the incidents were underreported, not ignored, CBS News reports. "He felt that members of media don't always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered," Spicer said. "Like a protest gets blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage."

  • The list—released with spelling mistakes, including the repeated use of "attak" and "attaks"—included little-known incidents in which nobody was killed and incidents with no clear link to ISIS, as well as major attacks that dominated media coverage for weeks, reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which notes that one of the five Australian incidents on the list, a fatal youth-hostel stabbing, was determined to be a murder and not a terrorist attack.
  • "All over Europe it's happening. It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported," Trump said, though the AP notes that out of the 78 listed attacks the White House says were "executed or inspired by" ISIS since September 2014, fewer than half occurred in Europe.
  • "ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the world," Trump told troops, according to the White House transcript of his remarks.
  • After the list was released, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the "real point" was that attacks are no longer getting the "wall-to-wall" coverage they did a few years ago. "They're happening so often—at a rate of more than once every two weeks, according to the list we sent around—that networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did," she said, per the Washington Post.
  • The Guardian reports that political analyst David Gergen described the "outrageous" claim that the media didn't want the public to know about terrorism as another example of Trump engaging in falsehoods "without producing any serious evidence." "The list includes San Bernardino, as if the press didn't cover that sufficiently," Gergen told CNN. "It's just astonishing and it's beneath the dignity of the presidency," he noted, warning that this is "the way democracies come unraveled."
(More President Trump stories.)

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