The media has been guilty of many failures in the nearly 20 years since Islamic militancy emerged as a global phenomenon with al-Qaida’s bombing of US embassies in east Africa in 1998, but under-reporting the threat it poses to westerners cannot conceivably be considered one of them.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, many journalists were as frightened, unaware and credulous as other members of the public. Few now remember the supposed tunnel complexes in which al-Qaida was supposed to have bunkered down in Afghanistan in late 2001.

This was the indestructible headquarters from which Osama bin Laden would orchestrate his next terrorist masterstroke. Described as vast subterranean bases with air conditioning and blast walls, they turned out to be simple caves that Bin Laden had long fled.

Nor do many now recall the reports of supposed plots – radioactive “dirty bombs” in the US, strikes on football stadiums in the UK, a poisonous fungus to be spread through the tube in London, releasing cyanide gas on to the New York subway – that made headlines in 2002 and 2003, but turned out to be largely baseless.

As conflicts in the Middle East continued, reporting became more sober than that of a decade earlier, a development lauded by experts who pointed out that the aim of terrorism is to terrorise – to create irrational fear.

Large-scale, deadly attacks such as those in Madrid, Bali and London between 2002 and 2005 dominated the news agenda for weeks. Genuine conspiracies, such as a 2006 plan hatched in an apartment in east London to bring down a dozen transatlantic passenger planes, also received massive media attention.

In the US, narrowly averted attacks – a bomb in Times Square and a plot to bring down a plane over the midwest – as well as incidents such as the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, prompted media interest of a rare intensity.

The emergence of Islamic State resulted in a familiar sensationalism. Like al-Qaida, Isis was reported to have to plans to acquire weapons of mass destruction; it was also said to want to use Ebola-infected “operatives” against enemies. US media reported a network of Isis sleeper cells in the “homeland” and sleeper agents in Europe, exactly as they had with al-Qaida. Those claims were, at best, a gross misrepresentation of how either organisation operates and individuals are radicalised.

In the aftermath of the Isis seizure of Mosul in 2014, British newspapers reported that 40kg of uranium stolen from science laboratories in the city’s university had been used by Isis to make a dirty bomb. Almost a year later, the Australian foreign minister made a similar claim, raising the prospect of a “large and devastating” attack. It was also widely reported.

The atmosphere in Europe after the Paris attacks in January 2015, which were only indirectly connected with Isis, also recalled that of a decade earlier, with conservative US commentators making the same hysterical claims of “no-go zones” in European cities where Islamic law had supposedly been imposed. This is not under-reporting the danger of Islamic militancy.

Most of the supposedly under-reported attacks listed by the White House on Monday involved westerners. The White House timeline starts in 2014 and runs to last year. In 2014, 32,658 people died in terrorist acts: about 10,000 in Iraq, more than 7,000 in Nigeria, more than 6,000 in Pakistan and Afghanistan combined, and nearly 2,000 in Syria. In 2015, the total was 29,376, with three-quarters of those deaths in the same five countries.

The western media is certainly guilty of under-reporting one aspect of the threat posed by Islamic militancy: to other Muslims. It is unlikely this is a concern in the Oval Office.