White House list of 'under-reported' terror attacks includes Orlando, San Bernardino, and Paris

Anyone who watched cable news, read a newspaper, logged onto Facebook, or blinked in the days after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Brussels, and Orlando were aware of what took place, but those well-documented incidents were included on a list distributed by a White House official Monday night of attacks the administration believes did not get enough media coverage.

The official said "most" of the 78 listed terrorist attacks that happened between 2014 and 2016 "did not receive adequate attention from Western media sources," CNN says. Earlier in the day, President Trump, while speaking at U.S. Central Command in Florida, falsely accused the media of choosing not to report terrorist attacks; White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer quickly walked back the comments a bit, saying Trump meant to say the incidents were "under-reported."

CNN's Jim Acosta was taken aback by the list, which included the 2016 Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in the United States, and the coordinated November 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. "It's a head-scratcher because several of these we here at CNN and other international news outlets covered extensively," he said. "It's puzzling as to why the White House would include these attacks on this list when they were covered for days on end."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The list is also riddled with errors and inaccuracies — San Bernardino is spelled wrong, as is the word "attacker" nearly a dozen times — and it does not note which of the attacks the Trump administration believes did receive adequate coverage.