Okay, I'll state it explicitly: I feel that the article is actively deceptive about the background of the author, which makes me distrust the content of the article as well. The sidebar with his background is not visible on the first page of the content, so I would have had to interrupt reading the article to read it.
I say that it is a bad writing style because I am assuming good faith. I assume that the positioning of his bio is merely unfortunate and not specifically chosen to reduce the number of people who read it, and that the article is not actually trying to deceive me about the author. I think it is obvious that coming across as astroturfing to some subset of your readers when that isn't what you're trying to do is a bad thing.
