The White House has distributed a list of 78 terrorist attacks to support US President Donald Trump’s claim that the media have failed to properly report them.
However, the list includes many atrocities that received blanket Western media coverage, including the Paris Bataclan attacks and the Nice truck killings in France, as well as the San Bernardino, California, shootings.
Many others, including the Sydney siege and Germany’s Christmas market attack, received wide international coverage.
The list also includes multiple errors and spelling mistakes, including “San Bernadino,” and excludes numerous terror attacks across the Middle East.
The release came after Trump on Monday told military leaders in Tampa, Florida, that there have been attacks all over Europe, but “in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.”
“They have their reasons, and you understand that,” Trump added, but did not expand.
Later White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about specific attacks that had not been reported, to which he replied: “We’ll provide a list later... There’s a lot of instances that have occurred where I don’t think they’ve gotten the coverage it deserved.”
That list, released to media outlets, included a “timeline” of domestic and international incidents from September 2014 to December last year.
Some, such as last year’s mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the killing of 129 people in Paris in November 2015, received huge coverage. However, US officials claimed that “most” of the attacks were not adequately reported by Western media outlets, CNN reported.
The list hops from Afghanistan to Algeria to Australia, but, without explanation, does not mention Israel, where incidents included a bus bombing in Jerusalem last year, carried out by a 19-year-old Palestinian, that injured 20 people.
The document also includes spelling mistakes such as “attaker” instead of “attacker” and “Denmakr” instead of “Denmark.”
David Gergen, former adviser to four US presidents, condemned Trump’s remarks.
“I think this is one of the most outrageous claims the president has made, among many, because it really says, basically, that the press is not doing its job because it has its own political agenda,” he told CNN. “It doesn’t want you to know the truth about how dangerous terrorism is. It doesn’t want to be out there, it’s just pulling a leftist agenda on you, which is clearly not true.”
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