Constructing a story by inhabiting the lives of its characters, as we read this week, is a potent form of journalism. There is a certain kind of credibility that a journalist can achieve by the simple act of saying, “I was there. I know what it was like. This is the story.” Caitlin Dickerson, for example, uses this tool in her piece on the Darien Gap, ending the nut graf with the sentence: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.” Each clause of the sentence is important, but what provides it a unique rhetorical force is the first: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the patter.” Each part of the ensuing piece, down to the last scrap of detail, is channeled through this clause and acts as evidence to support the rest of the sentence. Not only does embedded reporting lead to details in the piece (e.g., the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son, which Dickerson found out about by seeing a paper ad), it also adds the moral weight which distinguishes embedding from other methods of journalism.
At the same time, I do think that this credibility-raising has its limits. Although I recognize that Natalie O’Neill’s was tailored to a rightwing audience skeptical of the US’s decision to send military aid to Ukraine, I do feel that the way she framed the embedding was a bit overdone. Dickerson used herself as a character to emphasize the danger of the voyage and as a lens through which the reader could see the world. By contrast, O’Neill’s description of the danger she faced seemed less organic; phrases like “I felt a journalistic duty to trade the safety of Washington for a war zone to discover why Western weapons are so critical to Kyiv’s fight” risked putting her own story over the story of weapons she was trying to tell, as did her interjections emphasizing the danger not of the war itself, but of her decision to go to the warzone. Perhaps Siyeon’s argument that “there is only so much you can understand about something you are clearly not” is at the root of my quals with O’Neill’s piece: she seems less conscious of this fact throughout the piece, acting as a universal explainer while spending less time hinting at the fact that her knowledge of the war is necessarily incomplete. That said, I do feel that when O’Neill was talking about the subject matter itself with less explicit framings in service of her argument, the narrative that she produced was powerful and did do the job. I imagine the reader of the New York Post may have less qualms than I do—the narrative of “the embedding journalist” may serve to amplify, rather than detract from, its message. Perhaps, then, there is only so much I can understand about the viewpoint of the reader of the Post because they are a kind of person I am clearly not.
