paul_waldman

There's a journalistic trope that has become so common over the past couple of decades that you probably don't notice it anymore, or just assume that it's how news stories have always been written. It's what media scholars call the "exemplar" - an individual person whose story is used as a vehicle to explain the effects of a policy or an event.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/12/30/the-substance-and-politics-of-obamacare-in-one-citizen/