St. Cloud mall attack on list of terror attacks White House says often underreported

A stabbing at a St. Cloud mall last fall that left 10 people hurt and the suspect dead is among 78 terror attacks from around the globe believed to have ISIS ties that the White House said the media often inadequately cover.

The list released Monday night also includes highly-covered events such as the Orlando nightclub shooting last June, the 2015 attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and the July 2016 incident in Nice, France in which 84 people were killed and 308 wounded when a suspect drove a truck into a crowd. An attack in Paris in which at least 129 people were killed and approximately 400 wounded in series of shootings and IED attacks in November 2015 also was on the list.

President Donald Trump, in a speech delivered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. Monday, accused the "dishonest press" of under reporting many attacks and not providing sufficient coverage.

"Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland as they did on 911, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe. 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. In many cases the very very dishonest press does not want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand that."

The White House did not specifically state which ones it considered to have lacked attention or why the 78 were included on the list while others were no t.

In the case of the Sept. 17 stabbing at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, the Star Tribune had five front-pages with stories detailing how Somali refugee Dahir Adan, 20, had donned a security guard uniform and slashed his way through the mall with a pocket knife. in a Sept. 29 story, FBI Director James Comey told the newspaper that Adan was inspired in some way by a foreign terrorist group.

In a meeting with press on Monday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer made it clear that the attacks were not "unreported" but "underreported."

"There's a lot of instances that have occurred where I don't think that they've gotten the coverage it's deserved, and I think that's what the President was clearly referring to there," Spicer said. "He felt as if members of the media don't always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered; that a protest will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage."

The list was released just days after Kellyanne Conway, Trump's former campaign manager and now an adviser in his administration, issued a correction to her use of the phrase "Bowling Green massacre," an incident that never happened, but which Conway said the press did not cover.

Tim Harlow • 612-673-7768