About

Lady Reportera is a photoshop meme based on a photograph of Mexican reporter Lydia Cumming being carried through a flooded street in Puebla, Mexico, which began circulating widely on social media in late June 2016.

Origin

On June 27th, 2016, Mexico's TV Azteca reporter Lydia Cumming was photographed while a man and woman ferried her through a flooded street in Puebla, Mexico (shown below). According to Cumming, the photographer posted the photos to Facebook that evening.^[3]

Spread

On June 27th, journalist José Daniel Hernández^[1] reshared the photographs on Twitter, along with the hashtag "#LadyReportera" (shown below). Shortly after, Cumming replied to Hernández with the tweet "Only publishing for the sake of publishing without context" (shown below). The tweet has since been removed.

Over the next 24 hours, many Twitter users posted photoshopped images featuring a cutout of Cumming superimposed into various other base images, along with the hashtag "#LadyReportera"^[4] (shown below).

TV Azteca's Statement

On June 29th, TV Azteca issued an official statement announcing its decision to part ways with the reporter due to “the lack of respect shown towards the neighbors” (shown below).^[2] That day, the Spanish-language news site El Pais^[3] published an interview with Cumming, who claimed she had only been carried a distance of a few meters before being let down. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the viral photographs, including BuzzFeed,^[5] USAToday^[6] and the New York Post.^[7]

Search Interest

External References