The TV news divisions and networks are firing back at Pres. Trump after he accused the media of undercovering global terror attacks. In a speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Monday, Trump said, “You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. 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.”
Later Monday, the White House released a list of 78 global attacks from September 2014 to December 2016.
It didn’t take long for the networks to begin going through their archives to determine which of the attacks they covered and which they didn’t. On CBS This Morning, after explaining “the list has repeated spelling errors,” Josh Elliott reported, “CBS News alone covered more than 74% of the attacks on the list.”
NBC News says it covered 57 of the attacks on the list. “By contrast, the 21 attacks NBC News did not cover were smaller incidents in places like Egypt, Bosnia or Bangladesh, resulting in the deaths of just eight people, total,” NBC said.
On his show last night Anderson Cooper said, “not only did we cover many of the attacks on that list, we covered them heavily I know, because I was on the ground reporting a number of them.”
“Other programs as well as CNN International covered most if not all of them, most of them exhaustively,” Cooper added.
The BBC went through the list and found they didn’t cover 10 of 78 attacks, with explanations, and additions left off the White House list.
But in the end, the White House could end up winning this battle in Trump’s so-called “running war” with the media–misspellings and all. This creates a distraction, puts the press on defense, forcing them to dig through their archives to prove a point while viewers still end up concluding: “See. You only covered some of the attacks!”