Ashley Parker

Ashley R. Parker is an American journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning White House reporter for The Washington Post, and senior political analyst for MSNBC. From 2011 to 2017 she was a Washington-based politics reporter for The New York Times.

Parker was born and raised in Bethesda, Maryland. She has lived in Bethesda for the majority of her life, except during her college years and a few years while working for The New York Times. Her immediate family still resides in the area.

She married Michael Bender, a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal on June 16, 2018.

Parker attended Bethesda's Walt Whitman High School, where she was a member of the class of 2001. She also spent part of her junior year at La Universidad de Sevilla in Spain and is nearly fluent in Spanish.

In 2005, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English (Creative Writing concentration) and Communications. She had been a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, and during her senior year, was awarded the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize in writing. Parker also completed internships with The New York Sun and the Gaithersburg Gazette, which is owned by The Washington Post. She served as a features editor and writer at both 34th Street Magazine and The Daily Pennsylvanian, the independent student newspaper for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

After college at the University of Pennsylvania, Parker interned at the Gaithersburg Gazette and reported on local government, including city planning meetings.

She worked as a researcher for Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times.

She appeared and continues to appear on Washington Week on PBS, and she has also written for The New York Times Magazine.She covers many Republican Party candidates, elected officials, and topics.She also covers routine New York City topics and the White House. She also covered Chelsea Clinton's wedding for The New York Times.

Parker's photographs have appeared in Vanity Fair, and her writing has appeared in other publications, including The New York Sun, Glamour, The Huffington Post, Washingtonian, Chicago Magazine, and Life magazine.

On September 7, 2019 Donald Trump called Parker in a tweet a "nasty lightweight reporter" and called for banning her from the White House.