Comment by kubik369
5 hours ago
I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.
> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself.
I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible.
There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item.
"Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts.
There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult.
In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item.
> It can be debated whether the title should be such a question.
Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.