Washington held the first day of funeral services for Senator Lindsey Graham on Tuesday — Trump attended, and Netanyahu and Zelensky were in the pews, which tells you something about the causes Graham spent his life on. He died on July 11, at 71, suddenly. That part of the story has no angles. What happened in the headlines on Tuesday does. * NPR filed the day in the tribute genre: "In a day of tributes, Lindsey Graham is remembered as a tireless Washington mainstay." CNN's live blog: Graham "remembered in first day of funeral services," alongside an analysis of how the "Trump-Graham chemistry" reshaped US foreign policy. Note the verbs. Remembered. Chemistry. The record is present, but it's wearing a suit. * Al Jazeera filed the same day under a different genre entirely: "Lindsey Graham 'almost cried' tears of joy over war on Iran, footage shows." * The footage is real, and here's the wrinkle — it surfaced through the most establishment channel imaginable. A British filmmaker shadowed Graham for three years, 400-plus hours of tape, and gave excerpts to The Wall Street Journal. On the tape, days after the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, Graham says: "How long have we been pushing this? Look what we've done here. I almost cried." And: "I talked to Trump this morning. Oh, he's jacked! He said 'best thing I've ever done.'" In his last interview, in June, he worried a preliminary ceasefire meant Trump was "letting this thing slip away." * So the tape wasn't hiding. A Murdoch paper published it. The split is in what each newsroom did with it on funeral morning: the American headlines went with "remembered as," and Al Jazeera went with "footage shows." * Here's the thing about the tribute genre: it describes effort and character, never direction. "Tireless" is true — the man was famously tireless. But tireless at what? The footage answers in the first person: pushing a war, for years, and crying with joy when it arrived. "Foreign policy hawk," the standard obituary phrase, is that exact sentence with the feathers on. * And fair is fair in the other direction: Al Jazeera choosing the morning of the funeral to lead with the tape is also an editorial decision, and not a gentle one. Qatar's state-funded network had its own reasons to prefer Graham's record to his eulogies. Nobody in this story is framing by accident. * But only one of these genres would survive contact with the man himself, and — strangely — it's not the polite one. Graham spent three years narrating his own record to a camera crew, proudly, on purpose. The eulogies called him a mainstay and looked away from the details. The footage just let him finish his sentence.