A reporter’s tribute to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) backfired this week after it unwittingly revealed a request from the lawmaker that left her colleagues aghast.
Following Graham’s death of an aortic dissection at 71, Atlantic reporter Ashley Parker — who covered Congress for the New York Times — shared what she called a favorite memory of the senator.
“I have many Lindsey Graham stories,” Parker wrote on X. “This is perhaps my favorite.”
Parker said she was racing to Charleston in the summer of 2015 to cover Graham’s response to the Mother Emanuel church shooting — the deadliest mass shooting in South Carolina history, according to the Emanuel Nine Memorial Foundation — when she arrived still dressed in “what I’d be wearing to work that day.”
“He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours,” Parker wrote.
“You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes — maybe a dress — and take a shower, and then we’ll talk,” Parker recalled Graham telling her.
“I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him,” Parker wrote.
Her colleagues did not share her fondness for the memory.
“If any politician told me to put on a skirt, if I wanted access to his response to a mass shooting, that story would have been filed to my editor within 10 minutes,” Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez wrote on X.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald called it “one of the most bizarre stories for a journalist to tell about herself” and said it was revealing “of the relationship between corporate journalists and politicians,” writing on X.
“Uh, what,” Washington Post reporter Evan Hill posted on X, apparently at a loss for words.
“Wait, so Lindsey Graham demanded this reporter wear a dress, and then he was rewarded with a nice story?” journalist David Sirota asked on X.
Writer David Grossman pointed out that Parker’s piece was originally supposed to be about “the senator grappling with the unimaginable” — but ended up “fairly different” from what was planned.
“It certainly does not seem like he did much grappling,” Grossman added.
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