South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham died unexpectedly on Saturday from a heart condition at the age of 71. Graham, a retired Air Force officer who served more than two decades in the Senate, was influential in the Republican Party on foreign policy, election integrity, and national security.
The New York Times chose to remember him somewhat differently.
In its obituary for the longtime senator, Robert Jimison, Zachary Woolfe, and Amelia Nierenberg headlined their piece: “Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator and Staunch Trump Ally, Dies at 71.” Their subhead immediately included a line about his foreign policy, before returning to the subject at hand, that is, his death: “He consistently pushed for the use of U.S. military power overseas. The Washington, D.C., medical examiner said he died of an aortic dissection, a tear in the body’s main artery.”
It’s unclear why an obituary subhead announcing Graham’s death also needed to include a sentence summing up his legacy in a policy position that some have found controversial.
The Times then followed that coverage with a separate piece entitled “Lindsey Graham Had a Complicated Relationship With Black Voters.”
Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochraine wrote that while Graham “charmed many people at home, in Washington, and overseas … he was often at odds with one constituency: Black voters, who make up about a quarter of the electorate.” Notably the piece struggled to substantiate that framing. Instead it included several quotes from black leaders and activists about how Graham will be missed, with Rep. James Clyburn saying that Graham was “always pleasant and productive on behalf of the people of South Carolina.”
Compare the treatment of Graham to how the Times treated actual enemies of the United States.
When Qassim Suleimani was killed in 2020 by U.S. airstrikes, the Times’ Tim Arango, Ronen Bergman, and Ben Hubbard wrote: “Qassim Suleimani, Master of Iran’s Intrigue, Built a Shiite Axis of Power in Mideast.”
The subhead described Suleimani this way: “The commander helped direct wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and he became the face of Iran’s efforts to build a regional bloc of Shiite power.”
Rather than leading with the fact that Suleimani was behind the murder of Americans and our allies, the obituary tried to portray him as a strategic commander. In the third paragraph of the piece, The Times’ reporters wrote: “Just as his accomplishments shaped the creation of a Shiite axis of influence across the Middle East, with Iran at the center, his death is now likely to prove central to a new chapter of geopolitical tension across the region.”
In the days that followed, The Times continued its soft coverage, including articles entitled “The Killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani: What We Know Since the U.S. Airstrike,” and “What to Know About the Death of Iranian General Suleimani.”
In fact, the Times even used a neutral headline for the death of Adolf Hitler. The New York Times’ front page read in 1945: “Hitler Dead In Chancellery, Nazis Say: Doenitz Successor, Orders War To Go On: Berlin Almost Won; U.S. Armies Advance.”
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Times went out of its way to make Graham’s death partisan, but when one of the world’s most notorious terrorists is killed, the paper introduced him to readers as a man who “built a Shiite axis of power” who apparently had a vast geopolitical legacy.
