Donald Trump’s assertion that the media was “under-reporting” terrorist attacks was roundly scorned by the press, even more so when the White House released a list of 78 attacks that hadn’t been covered enough – including Paris, Nice and Berlin. As CNN’s Tara Mulholland put it: “This is like your friend on Facebook who goes, ‘Why isn’t the MSM reporting this?!’ while linking to MSM reports. Except it’s the White House.”

White House's 'under-reported' terror list includes many well-known attacks Read more

A frenzy of fact-checking followed – with the Guardian, the BBC, the Washington Post and many more analysing the list for mistakes, omissions, and the inclusion of some of the western world’s biggest news stories in the last two years

If the visits to our article are anything to go by, they are being very well read. But I’m reminded of Clay Shirky complaining during the US presidential campaign that, “We’ve brought fact-checkers to a culture war”, and Hussein Kesvani writing recently that “fact checkers are terrible at telling stories”, whereas the neo-Nazi “alt-right” movement is great at building and maintaining a narrative.

As journalists, we have to realise that what was on the list isn’t really the message. It’s not that individual details of the attacks don’t matter, but what Trump is signalling here is that there is a level and frequency of Islamic State-led or -inspired attacks that amount to an existential threat to western Christian civilisation. A threat that he and his followers see as acute, but that isn’t taken seriously enough by the media. A threat that the previous administration was not able to counter or deal with. It’s notable that Trump’s list abruptly stops in December 2016.

The accusation that the media downplays what Trump calls “radical Islamic terrorism” is also a prevalent trope among far-right activists on the web. As someone who sometimes runs the Guardian’s social media channels during breaking news events, I know that even when only the sketchiest details of an incident are available there will be messages sent to us outraged that we haven’t mentioned that the perpetrators are Muslim, regardless of who turns out to have carried out the attack. If we use the word “incident” because we are directly quoting a police spokesperson, we are guaranteed to get replies demanding to know why we haven’t been “honest” and called it a “terrorist attack”.

There’s an argument that actually, some elements of the media are inclined to over-report 'Islamic' terror

There’s an argument that actually, some elements of the media are inclined to over-report “Islamic” terror. The Sun famously, for example, put on its front page that Norway had suffered its 9/11 – implying that white-supremacist extremist Anders Breivik’s attack was an al-Qaida plot. And last night the Daily Express website seized on the story of an explosion in Cologne and gave it the headline and strapline “Major explosion in Cologne sparks lockdown – several injured. A massive explosion has ripped through the heart of downtown Cologne in Burgmauer near the Statdtmuseum.”

The explosion didn’t really make news anywhere else, and the Express story now, finally, states it was a couple of propane gas cylinders in a basement. But that hadn’t stopped the story being immediately shared on the Britain First Facebook page as breaking news, where commentators jumped straight in asking what John Bercow and other anti-Trump figures would have to say about it. Official explanations that it was a gas canister explosion were dismissed with the thinking face emoji.

Another common trope is that any incident will inevitably have “witnesses” posting to social media that the perpetrators were overheard to shout, “Allahu Akbar”. This happened with the Québec City mosque shooting and made headlines in the UK from Sky, the Mirror and MailOnline, even though the suspect is now widely reported to have white nationalist sympathies. Early reports are often confused and garbled. But in the course of these events unfolding, news organisations that don’t report claims of these shouts as fact will frequently be challenged on why they aren’t giving it prominence.

The challenge for journalists is that it is a lot easier for the far right to assert these things as “facts” that the media are suppressing than it is to refute them. For one thing, they are difficult journalistically. Again on the Britain First Facebook page they have a video from the last couple of days stating that chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s are funding “Islamic terrorism” by selling halal-certified products.

The accusation is based on a similar premise that fuelled conspiracy theories about halal certification in Australia in 2015. The argument is that companies pay to be halal-certified, the organisations that certify halal compliance will pay zakat, and in turn one of zakat’s stated purposes in the Qur’an is to fund jihad. I can tell you it is racist conspiracy nonsense of the highest order, but it would be a hell of a lot of work for me to exhaustively audit the money trail from Cadbury’s and definitively refute it. And even then it’s unlikely that would sway those that prefer the conspiracy, as it fits their warped worldview – the fact checks that turned up no evidence in Australia in 2015 haven’t stopped the propaganda resurfacing in the UK two years later.

What the Trump administration’s error-strewn list does is push journalists on to the back foot. The hours spent fact-checking and refuting his ludicrous claims are replicated across news organisation after news organisation, rather than focusing on what Trump is actually doing – trying to force through Betsy DeVos as education secretary, or scrapping the regulations on banks that were put in place after the 2007 crash.

As we get to grips with living in an era in which the White House is going to call the press “very, very dishonest” people who are suppressing information, we, as journalists, are going to have to wrestle with how to deal with this. Infowars, Breitbart, Britain First – the sort of websites and organisations that are spreading the far right’s anti-Muslim, conspiracy-theory-ridden ideology – are not going to be afraid to double-down on spreading their message. Fact-checking their spurious claims is one thing – but what does it achieve? To really challenge the spread of this nonsense we need to work out what we are going to do about more effectively spreading the truth.