At first I was stunned that any journalist would so closely align himself with a candidate's campaign. Surely non-partisanship is a basic requirement of reporting, as distinct from opinion writing. But it was all a ruse, you see. The assignment had been to examine politicking from the inside out by venturing – under trench coat cloak and ballpoint dagger – into the belly of the beast. In the event, all this scribe had to show for his stealth was an autographed photo of himself with Obama. Stop the presses.
Going "undercover" to tell a story is just about the laziest form of reporting existent. The conceit is that a reporter masquerading as a citizen sign-up – or homeless person or religious cultist or domestic – can better grasp the matter by providing a first-person in-those-shoes account. But this is shortcut journalism and intrinsically dishonest.
I say dishonest not because of the core misrepresentation – duplicity is a common tactic in reporting, if only by posing as a sympathetic audience – but because a story thus told becomes more about the narrator and less about the subject. Why bother asking the relevant questions or doing the time-consuming research when the reporter can just "see for himself"?
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