© Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty ImagesDefense Secretary Jim Mattis simply has a different style than his predecessors, says Pentagon press secretary Dana White.
Pentagon reporters are complaining of decreased access to Defense Secretary James Mattis, as well as a reduction in journalists allowed to travel on official trips, at a time when the Trump administration is dealing with national security challenges from the Middle East to North Korea.
Under Mattis, the Defense Department has become less transparent and publicly accountable than it has been in previous administrations, according to interviews with numerous reporters who cover the beat. The reporters requested anonymity, saying they feared that being quoted by name could lead to further loss of access.
"This is the worst relationship I've seen," said one Pentagon reporter who also covered the department under multiple secretaries of defense during President Barack Obama's administration.
Under previous administrations, all three wire services - The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse - had typically been allowed to cover each trip made by the defense secretary. But that hasn't been the case under Mattis. In response to the Pentagon excluding a Reuters correspondent from an upcoming trip, a spokesperson for the wire service declared that the decision "breaks with decades of standing practice."
At the same time, Mattis appears to be becoming increasingly wary of the press, said an administration official close to the situation.
"There is a growing perception by Secretary Mattis that the media is trying to pit him against the president and deliberately misinterpret the things that he says," said the administration official.
The official cited the recent example of when President Donald Trump tweeted, "The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years. Talking is not the answer!" Later that day, Mattis had said, "We are never out of diplomatic solutions," which was widely portrayed as in conflict with the president's stance. Mattis later clarified, "Diplomatic can include economic sanctions, not just talking. It didn't contradict anything the president said."
Tensions between reporters and Pentagon officials came to a head in mid-August, after a handful of journalists were disinvited from a trip to the Middle East, just days before their planned departure. This type of last-minute cut had occurred on previous trips by Mattis, and the incident sparked outrage among the press corps.
It led to a meeting the following day between leaders of the Pentagon Press Association, a group representing the interests of defense reporters, and Pentagon press secretary Dana White and her staff. The PPA aired several grievances in the meeting, mostly related to diminished access, reporters said. While the practice of disinviting reporters from trips has ceased, reporters say, little else has changed in the time since. If anything, the ill will generated by booting the reporters from the Middle East trip - after they had gone to significant trouble and expense to secure visas and make preparations - has left lingering frustration.
"There is definitely spillover" bad feelings from that August incident, the reporter said. All four members of the PPA leadership team declined or did not respond to requests for comment. White rejected the notion that access has declined under Mattis.
"I think that there is always a natural tension between us, but I think there are some really great reporters here," she said. "They have unfettered access to our 25 press officers. We've had 118 press engagements with transcripts. They have unfettered access to me. I get phone calls all the time and emails. I think it's a very healthy, good relationship."
In the past, Pentagon reporters have enjoyed an unusual level of access to senior officials, compared with their counterparts in other departments. Journalists who work out of the building's press center are free to roam most areas of the building and many have worked there for years - if not decades - allowing them to build up strong relationships, especially with the nonpolitical uniformed staff.
But the fear now is that the Trump administration's war on the press has spilled into the Pentagon. While the reporters emphasized that they have not been totally cut off, and that the situation has not grown as fraught as in the State Department - where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has traveled at times with virtually no press - they are worried that conditions are moving in that direction.
"The press corps' fear is it's a slippery slope," one reporter said. Mattis does talk to the press, but usually while on trips or in impromptu and off-camera sessions in the Pentagon Press Center. He has held just two formal Pentagon briefings, with the last one coming in May. Though White cites statistics showing that Mattis' number of "engagements" with the media is only slightly lower than that of his Obama administration predecessors - 15 per month for Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, 14 per month for Chuck Hagel and Ash Carter, and 13 per month for Mattis - reporters note that those former secretaries spoke more often on camera and in formal settings. The reporter worried that Mattis' lack of podium appearances is leaving Americans in the dark about the military.
Some reporters said the issues with Mattis are magnified by the fact that Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also appears on camera less frequently than some of his predecessors.
"You have to wonder whether that's going to create a problem, either geopolitically or just in the public's understanding," he said.
White said that Mattis simply has a different style than his predecessors.
"I can't speak to how it has been, but I think it's also important to understand that Secretary Mattis is a secretary who's cut of a different cloth," she said, referring to his long career as a Marine Corps general. "His focus is the war fighter. Lots of people who've been in these jobs have been politicians and they've been technocrats and they've been bureaucrats."
When the leaders of the PPA met with White and her staff in August - a discussion reported on at the time by Foreign Policy magazine - they complained about the lack of on-camera briefings from both her and Mattis. Other complaints included that not enough senior Pentagon officials were going on the record with enough frequency and that, because top officials were so tight-lipped, other members of the military had become less likely to engage with the media.
But in the wake of the reporters being cut from the Middle East trip, travel was an especially contentious point. White denied that there has been any change to official travel policy, saying the Pentagon has always had the authority to choose how many and which reporters accompany the defense secretary on trips.
In the recent past, defense secretaries have typically taken 12 to 15 reporters with them per trip, according to a former Pentagon official, though that number could range higher or lower. Under Mattis, the number has been fewer, sometimes with just one of the wire services allowed to go.
White said there is no set number and each trip is evaluated independently, adding that her staff weighs a number of factors, including location and security issues, before deciding who to invite.
"I try to get as many spaces for press as I possibly can," she said. "And I have to make tough decisions that are dictated by diversity of reporting, security, scheduling."
"There were six people on this past trip to Mexico, Omaha and North Dakota," she said. "On his trip to the West Coast, there were four reporters - Bloomberg, Breitbart. On his very first trip to Asia, he had 18 reporters."
White added that she regretted inconveniencing reporters by pulling their invitations after they had made preparations, and that the practice had stopped.
© Alex Brandon/Associated PressDefense Secretary Jim Mattis appears to be becoming increasingly wary of the press, said an administration official close to the situation.
"Reuters sought clarification and Washington bureau chief Kieran Murray spoke with Pentagon spokesperson Dana White on Sept 8," Reuters said in an emailed statement to POLITICO. "She said the Pentagon has not changed its standing policy and that this is just one trip, without explaining what the Pentagon's policy would be on how many journalists, and which journalists, would travel with Secretary Mattis in the future."
The statement continued, "Reuters believes it is important that the government provide media access to senior policymakers and it has for many years covered all foreign trips by the president and the Secretary of Defense. The decision to exclude Reuters from the upcoming trip breaks with decades of standing practice."
Reporters on trips are able to document the secretary's movements firsthand, sometimes in places that could not be otherwise accessed. Reporters also say the trips provide invaluable opportunities to cultivate sources, when Pentagon officials and their staffs are stuck with them on airplanes or holed up in the same hotel restaurants and bars.
"There's no substitute for actually being in the place, being in Seoul, South Korea, being in Istanbul, and you're talking to the different officials who've just come out of the building and they're able to speak to you," a reporter said.
Mattis does regularly make his way to the Pentagon press center for press "gaggles," giving groups of reporters the chance to banter with him back and forth. White points out that he usually passes through once per week.
"I think that he's interested in having a conversation," she said. "He thinks having the conversation in the bullpen is much more conducive to people learning how he's thinking and it's a much more open conversation."
While the gaggles do have benefits, reporters say, those off-camera meetings can catch them off guard, and are easily missed if they happen to be away from their desks.
"On the one hand, he seems to want to be able to chat with reporters, on the other he doesn't want to be on camera," a reporter said. "There are many reasons why one would want to stay off of the television."
One big reason to stay off television could be the president's viewing habits. Reporters describe White telling them that she wanted to avoid the "spectacle" of news conferences. Other administration officials have run into trouble by appearing to grab too much of the spotlight, or by contradicting the president in public. By staying off of cable news, the former Pentagon official said Mattis could be helping keep relations calm with his boss - especially given the defense secretary's growing belief that the media intends to set him in opposition to Trump.
Another sore point for reporters was the departure of Col. Steve Warren, a longtime military spokesman who had agreed to leave active military service to take a civilian position as a spokesperson under Mattis - only to be let go in August. For reporters who respected Warren's blunt, forthright style, the decision caused deep bitterness and served as a bad omen.
White said Warren didn't make it through the White House's vetting process. Warren did not respond to requests for comment.
The Pentagon press operations staff is composed of both politically appointed civilian staff, like White, and military officers who span administrations. One reporter said she felt the political side was increasingly leaving military press officials in the dark.
"For me, the big issue is people not knowing anything," she said. "A lot of the press people I deal with regularly are the same on the service level, but that bridge between them and the White House is not really there anymore."
White declined to answer whether the Pentagon's shrinking access was in any way directed or influenced by the White House. "I would just disagree with the premise," she said, emphasizing that she believed press access to be robust.
When Mattis made his way to the Pentagon Press Center on Aug. 31 for an on-the-record session, it wasn't long before the issue of access and transparency came up. After some discussion, one reporter said, according to an official transcript, "I don't want to belabor the point on access to the media, but if you come in here, can you please consider having some process by which we all know. The problem is that when it's very ad hoc, it leads to holes in the reporting when we don't all know."
After a little more back and forth, the defense secretary shot back, "I could make it a lot more rigid, trust me."
The following week, Mattis did not appear in the press center.
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