The White House has sent journalists a list of terror attacks it believes did not receive adequate attention from Western media including five incidents in Australia, one of which was determined to be a murder case.
It follows President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated claim on Monday that news outlets were intentionally not covering terrorist attacks in the West.
"All over Europe it's happening. It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported," Mr Trump said at Central Command headquarters in Florida.
"And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
"They have their reasons, and you understand that."
Mr Trump declined to provide an example to support his radical theory of a global media conspiracy to whitewash coverage of terrorism.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer tried to tone down the President's remarks, saying it was a question of balance: "Like a protest gets blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage".
The White House later sent out a list of 78 terrorist attacks from September 2014 to December 2016 to journalists, claiming it supported Mr Trump's claim that "most have not received the media attention they deserved".
Among this list are five incidents in Australia, including the tragic stabbing of Mia Ayliffe-Chung at a Townsville hostel in August 2016, which Queensland Police specifically determined to be a murder case rather than a terrorist attack.
Other Australian incidents listed in the White House document are:
- The Sydney Lindt Cafe siege in December 2014
- The 2015 shooting of Curtis Cheng, a NSW Police accountant, in Parramatta
- The non-fatal stabbing of a 59-year-old man in Minto, NSW, last September
- The non-fatal stabbing of a Victorian Police officer and an Australian Federal Police officer outside the Endeavour Hills police station in 2014
The list also includes major attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, London and Brussels, which separately dominated global headlines for weeks in their aftermath.
AP could not verify that each of the incidents had connections to the Islamic State group. The list appeared to be hastily assembled, including several misspellings of the word "attacker".
Since entering the political fray, Mr Trump's relationship with the news media has been turbulent and often bellicose.
