Saving the Most Important Things for Last
I’d heard about this piece over at Politico a few weeks ago, but just got around to reading it and it was as bad as people said it was. Besides the fact that the “historians” (which gives the impression of an authoratative group of people) were actually just two individuals, it’s not until the third to last ‘graf that we learn that one of the two historians quoted is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor who was an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter during the primaries.
Placing that obviously relevant information at the end of the piece is something my journalism professors would call “burying the lede”. In journalism, you want to get the most important and relevant info up high, so the reader doesn’t trail off and miss an important piece of info, like the fact that one of the people quoted had a dog in the race, so to speak. It’s a sign of poor writing, as is only using two people to make broad, sweeping generalizations.