The mass shooting at an LGBTQ Orlando nightclub, Pulse, was listed as one of the 78 terrorist attacks under-reported, according to the White House. | Getty White House offers list of terrorist attacks the press allegedly took lightly

The White House released on Monday a list of 78 terrorist attacks that the Trump administration claim were not sufficiently covered by the nation's press. The list, however, included some mass killings that were covered well enough to make their locales into symbols of anger and grief: Orlando and San Bernardino, Nice and Paris in France, and Brussels in Belgium.

According to a White House official, the international list was sent out to prove the point "that these terrorists attacks are so pervasive at this point that they do not spark the wall-to-wall coverage they once did."


"If you look back just a few years ago, any one of these attacks would have been ubiquitous in every news outlet, and now they're happening so often — at a rate of more than once every two weeks, according to the list — that networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did," the official said.

"This cannot be allowed to become the 'new normal,'" the official added.

The list came out after President Donald Trump said Monday that the media has not been reporting adequately on recent terrorist attacks, focusing instead of such things as people protesting against his administration. And while the list includes several major attacks that dominated headlines for weeks, there are several attacks listed that likely did not merit much U.S. news coverage, at least relative to the Orlando Massacre or San Bernardino.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” Trump said earlier Monday. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

Under-reported terrorist attacks became a point of public discussion after Kellyanne Conway, a top counselor to Trump, cited a terrorist attack in Bowling Green that never occurred. And the list also furthers the Trump administration's narrative that the press is focused on the wrong things, if not hostile to the White House — the "opposition party" according to top Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

But some of the attacks mentioned on the White House list drew wall-to-wall coverage, such as the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December 2015 where 14 people were killed and 22 others were injured by U.S. citizen Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, who was a permanent resident. Others in the United States included the massacre at an LGBTQ Orlando nightclub in June 2016 that claimed 49 lives.

The list of incidents from September 2014 to December 2016 references "targets" and "attackers" for each incident in question, and lists casualties. In several instances, the word "attacker" is misspelled as "attaker" or "attakers."

A number of the incidents on the list are said to have had no casualties. The most lethal was the spate of attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. According to the White House, at least 129 people died in that coordinated terrorist assault.

Some of the events listed may or may not have specific connections to terrorism. For instance, the list refers to the shooting of a police officer in Philadelphia in January 2016. The officer, Jesse Hartnett, was seriously wounded by an assailant who told people he was influenced by ISIS.

Others don't meet customary definitions of terrorism. An instance in Algeria in September 2014 would seem to refer to the beheading of a French tourist, Herve Gourdel, who had been held hostage — a gruesome murder but not something that would traditionally fit the definition of terrorism.

Oddly, the list includes no attacks in Israel, despite a spate of knife attacks in 2015-16 that were meant to terrorize the population. It also doesn’t include the mass shooting of African American churchgoers by Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist, at a Charleston church in June 2015, or a mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in November 2015.

Of the 78 attacks, 11 occurred in the United States.

Other countries on the list: Afghanistan, Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia, Britain, Canada, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said the report mentioned the bombing at the Boston Marathon. That incident predated the events in the list, as it occurred in April 2013.