The media has been covering terrorism attacks in a disproportionate way, but the Trump administration doesn't want that to be the "new normal," presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted Tuesday morning, a day after a list of 78 attacks the White House claimed were not sufficiently covered was released.
"Frankly, we were looking at a report this morning actually from a left-leaning group that showed the network coverage, with 333 minutes or so on Donald Trump during the Republican primaries, and in one network's case, eight minutes on terrorism," said Conway on Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program.
"We're trying to verify this report but it tells you the disproportion."
Show host Bill Hemmer pointed out that he did not know about some of the attacks on the White House list, but there were other prominent ones, such as in Paris, Orlando, and San Bernardino, that had high coverage, including from him.
"What the president is saying is that the ones you are pointing out we had a high number of casualties and got international coverage and wall-to-wall coverage as well they should have," Conway said. "They remind us that ISIS is not the JV team that is in retreat as President [Barack]Obama said. Not our determined enemies, whatever the heck that means as Hillary Clinton referred to them. They were not called radical Islamic terrorists. This president will."
The fact that Hemmer, as a "news guy" didn't know about some of the attacks "tells you we're becoming inured to some of these attacks that don't lead to mass casualties, thank God, but still don't get the attention," Conway said.
Trump is making the point that terrorism is real and ISIS is on the advance, said Conway.
"At some point they promised to disguise themselves as refugees coming into the U.S.," she said. "Others have promised to continue to do their blood-letting on western soil. We had an attack in Turkey very recently. So anybody who thinks that this is just an issue and a movement of terrorists fading into the background is wrong and the president wants to shine a light on that."
Meanwhile, a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to appeal a stay on the president's executive order on travel from the Middle East, and Conway said the government will prevail on its contention that states filing lawsuits don't have legal standing.
Conway also said she expects Trump's nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, will be approved on Tuesday, even with a 50-50 split, as that means Vice President Mike Pence will cast the tie-breaking vote.
"We see what the Democrats did to her, humiliate and embarrass some of these nominees, cherry picking her record," Conway said. "This is a woman very committed to education in this country . . . why in the world are these students trapped in failing schools based on the zip code where they live? This is a very important issue to kids and their parents. We want parental and local control."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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