Donald Trump’s rallies and news conferences have featured everything from verbal attacks on the media to physical attacks on protestors. One major news organization is taking extra measures to prepare its staff.
Trump’s campaign events have become such a spectacle that NPR sent its political reporters to 90-minute hostile-environment awareness training, according to The Washington Post.
“News organizations, government agencies and nongovernmental organizations generally employ such training to help employees respond to such hazards as riots, mortar attacks, kidnappings or firefights,” the Post writes.
These training courses are typically meant to prepare journalists for covering war zones or regions where terrorists are active, but the Trump versions are scaled back.
NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara told the Post the sessions are designed to deal “with the stress of covering a very demanding story for a long period of time. We make training widely available to newsrooms staff whether they work internationally or domestically.”
NPR is the only known news organizations to undergo such training. We can officially confirm that TheWrap employees are surviving political coverage without hostile-environment training.