Jack Briggs: Reporter to discuss challenges of covering Trump administration at Badger Club meeting

President Trump’s jousting with the news media — often unleashed in early morning tweet storms — is presenting sharp new challenges for journalists covering the White House and its policies, from health care to counter terrorism.

And for the public seeking answers to those issues.

Take one day, Feb. 24, as an example of this confrontational era. In a speech in Washington, D.C., President Trump called journalists “the enemy of the people.” A few moments later, he criticized as “fake news” news organizations that publish anonymously sourced reports that reflected poorly on him.

Soon after the speech, White House press secretary Sean Spicer barred journalists from The New York Times (which the President has labeled the “failingNYTimes”) and several other news organizations from attending his daily briefing, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps.

President Trump’s assault against the news media continued that evening. “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth,” he wrote on Twitter.

How badly does that undermine the credibility of the nation’s press as it covers an issue of increasing importance — namely how the administration is combating terrorism?

Speaking April 7 to the Columbia Basin Badger Club in Richland is a man who is sitting at the center of that issue. Eric Schmitt was a Tri-City Herald reporter in the early 1980s but has spent the past 35 years as a reporter for The New York Times.

He is now the Times’ senior reporter on national security and terrorism. Along the way he has been a member of two Pulitzer prize-winning teams and co-authored a book on counter terrorism. He covered the Gulf War in early 1991 (during which he lived in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for three months,) Somalia in 1992 and Haiti in 1994. He has made 10 reporting trips to Iraq and five to Afghanistan.

Schmitt’s discussion will include how he feels President Trump and his top aides are wielding the prerogatives of the presidency to discredit those who challenge or scrutinize him, dismissing negative stories as lies.

Even some of President Trump’s Cabinet officers make reporting on the new administration more difficult.

As an example, Rex W. Tillerson, the new secretary of state, summed up his approach to the media when he told the sole reporter he permitted on his airplane for a trip to Asia in March: “I’m not a big media press access person. I personally don’t need it.”

Limiting journalists’ access and impugning their credibility — even their patriotism — are troubling signs in the early days of this administration. It could complicate the public’s ability to assess Mr. Trump’s policies if he assails the trustworthiness of the media reporting on them.

That reporting includes President Trump’s counter terrorism policy. In their two months in office, Schmitt feels President Trump officials have given little indication they want to distance themselves from President Obama’s strategy to train, equip and otherwise support indigenous armies and security forces to wage their own wars instead of having to deploy large American forces to far-flung hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.

President Trump had promised to be more aggressive in taking on the Islamic State — even suggesting during the presidential campaign that he had a secret plan. Yet he had also signaled a desire to rein in the notion of the United States as the world’s peacekeeper and claimed at various points to have opposed the ground invasion of Iraq.

Now, surrounded by generals who have been at the center of a decade-long shift to rely on Special Operations forces to project power without the risks and costs of large ground wars, Schmitt will discuss how he feels President Trump appears to be choosing, at least for now, to maintain the same approach but giving the Pentagon more latitude.

That leeway may help accelerate strikes against militants, but it also carries its own perils of inadvertently killing civilians.

The media’s ability to report on and explain complicated policies like this are an important public service that deserve the White House’s support, not its scorn.

This story was originally published April 1, 2017 at 1:05 PM with the headline "Jack Briggs: Reporter to discuss challenges of covering Trump administration at Badger Club meeting."