COVERING TRUMP Manship School hosts national reporters to kick off speaker series

BY CLAIRE SULLIVAN & GABBY JIMENEZ LSU MANSHIP SCHOOL NEWS SERVICE

Ashley Parker was enjoying sleeping in on a fall Saturday in 2019, her husband tending to their young daughter. Then her phone started vibrating nonstop.

President Donald Trump had tweeted out that Parker and her Washington Post colleague were “nasty lightweight reporters” who “shouldn’t even be allowed on the grounds of the White House because their reporting is so DISGUSTING & FAKE.”

She had earned what political rivals and many covering Trump often received–a dismissive nickname. She kept her head down and kept working.

Parker, a senior national political correspondent at the Post, and her husband, Michael C. Bender, an author and White House correspondent for The New York Times, visited the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication Thursday to share their experiences as journalists covering Trump during his attacks on the press.

They also talked to more than 100 students about how they clung to their training, talking to multiple Trump aides for even the simplest stories, despite all the fake news claims.

Funding for Parker and Bender’s visit came from a $100,000 gift to the Manship School by Charles “Chick” Moore, a retired Baton Rouge lawyer.

LEGISLATURE

Moore, who is troubled by rising distrust in the media, said he wants people to understand more about how journalists work and why their work remains important.

Parker and Bender met while covering Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush in 2016. They’ve “almost always been competitors,” Bender said.

To beat GOP leaders like Bush and then Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump “flipped the playbook