JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

The Washington Post and The New York Times have been taking turns landing haymakers on President Donald Trump’s exposed chin the last two days.

For anyone who loves journalism, it’s a BU-ti-ful thing, as former KC Star editor Mark Zieman, used to say.

On Monday, Post reporters Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe broke the story about Trump revealing highly classified information about the Islamic state to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting. The killer quote from that meeting was Trump’s kid-in-a-candy-store exclamation: “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

Yesterday, The Times dropped a blockbuster of its own when reporter Michael S. Schmidt reported that, at a private meeting in February, Trump had asked FBI director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn.

In the meeting with Comey, Trump produced another jaw-dropping quote. Referring to Flynn, he said to Comey: “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Whatever you think of Trump, you’ve gotta love this kind of reporting — and the fact that we in the United States place such high value on a free press. Imagine if this had happened in Turkey, a country spiraling down into autocracy. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have every journalist in the country locked up. In Russia? Wouldn’t have happened. Putin already has the press firmly under his heel. No one would dream of writing such a story.

Another thing to be thankful for is that the people working for and around Trump are obviously very willing to rat him out. If Trump and a majority of Republicans in Congress are not yet willing to put country ahead of politics, it appears that quite a few White House employees are.

The Times’ Frank Bruni has an excellent column on that subject today. In it, he says:

This much leaking this soon in an administration is a powerful indication of what kind of president we have. He is so unprepared, shows such bad judgment and has such an erratic temper that he’s not trusted by people who are paid to bolster him and who get the most intimate, unvarnished look at him. Some of them have decided that discretion isn’t always the keeping of secrets, not if it protects bad actors. They’re right. And they give me hope.

Later, Bruni added: “Aides will suck up a whole lot for proximity to power, and partisans will make enormous compromises in the name of the team. But at the end of the day, they’re human. They have limits, dignity and the mobile phone numbers of dozens of reporters.”

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Here’s a closer look at the reporters who broke those big stories…

Greg Jaffe went to The Post in 2009 from the Wall Street Journal, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a series on defense spending. In introducing him to readers, The Post called him “one of the nation’s top journalists covering military affairs.” He has co-authored at least one book, “The Fourth Star,” about the careers of four prominent Army generals from 1970 through the Iraq war. In 2012, he was honored by the University of Missouri School of Journalism for a series of stories about the growing divide between the American military and civilian society after a decade of war in Afghanistan.

Greg Miller has worked for The Post since 2010. His current title is national security correspondent. Last November, a few days after the election, he reported that the intelligence community had “a sense of dread” about Trump’s impending presidency. Before going to The Post, Miller was a reporter for The Los Angeles Times for more than 15 years. He was among several Post reporters awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden. He was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism policies, and he co-authored of a book about Americans who interrogated prisoners captured in the war on terror. He has made reporting trips to countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait and Serbia.

Greg Miller of the Washington Post, with a Post colleague

Schmidt

Michael S. Schmidt is one of The Times’ lead reporters on the federal and Congressional investigations into connections between Trump’s associates and the Russians. In March 2015, he broke the story that Hillary Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account when she was secretary of state. As a Times correspondent in Iraq in 2011, he uncovered a series of classified documents in a junkyard in Baghdad. The documents were testimony from Marines about a 2005 massacre in which Marines had killed 26 Iraqi civilians. Schmidt began working for The Times as a news clerk in 2005. In December 2007, he was made a staff reporter. In 2009, he broke the stories that David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa were among about 100 major league baseball players who tested positive for having used performance-enhancing drugs.

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The Post, at least, has recorded tangible results from its big story. Glenn Kessler, the paper’s “fact checker,” said the paper’s story about Trump’s revelation of classified information broke the paper’s record for readers per second clicking on the article. Kessler said the newsroom broke into applause at the news of the new record.

I say The Post and The Times both deserve sustained applause from all Americans these days. Were it not for a free press, we would be no better than Russia or Turkey.