President says media doesn’t report terror attacks, media responds with outrage and fury
If you open your window right now, you will be able to hear the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and the BBC and all the rest collectively screaming, “Oh yes we do!” But President Trump is correct. He said: “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even reported, and in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t even want to report it.” The establishment propaganda media has taken this to mean that he was claiming they didn’t even mention the attacks. They did. But in virtually all cases, they did all they could to obscure the motivating ideology behind those attacks. They deliberately conceal and/or misrepresent the aspects of them that make it clear that they’re Islamic jihad attacks. This is in accord with the guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists, which tells journalists not to connect Islam with terrorism, and to obscure that connection wherever possible.
One notorious example of this is the Orlando massacre. Mainstream news outlets claimed that Omar Matteen was a conflicted gay man lashing out at other gays. This was outright disinformation: the FBI later announced that there was no evidence that he was gay, no gay apps on his phone, etc. Few outlets published his actual remarks, making it clear that he was killing for the Islamic State and Islam. The coverage of terrorist incidents in general in the establishment media deliberately misleads the public.
“White House List Contradicts Trump Claim That Terror Attacks Go Unreported,” by Brian Naylor and Jessica Taylor, NPR, February 6, 2017:
President Trump, in another broadside against the news media, on Monday accused “the dishonest press” of failing to report terrorist attacks.
But in a list put out by the White House later Monday evening, many of the attacks cited, such as the attack the Orlando night club shooting last June and 2015 attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris were extensively covered by the media around the clock.
Speaking to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, Trump cited a series of recent attacks and then added, “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even reported, and in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t even want to report it.”
Trump told the troops that the media “have their reasons, and you understand that,” but didn’t elaborate beyond that.
Trump initially cited no examples of the media’s failure to report terrorist attacks. Onboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington with the president, press secretary Sean Spicer said terrorist attacks “aren’t exactly covered to a degree on which they should be” and said they would release a full list of examples soon.
Late Monday evening, the White House did just that. According to a White House official, the point they were trying to make “is 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 … that networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did,” the administration official continued.
PolitiFact rated Trump’s claim as “Pants on Fire,” writing that they “found no support for the idea that the media is hushing up terrorist attacks on U.S. or European soil. The media may sometimes be cautious about assigning religious motivation to a terrorist attack when the facts are unclear or still being investigated. But that’s not the same as covering them up through lack of coverage. There is plenty of coverage of in the American media of terrorist attacks.”…
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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on Jihad Watch.
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