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.
The journalists credibility is doing quite a bit of lifting here as we have to trust that they put in the effort. One such example is the molesting accusations which the reporters say they heavily looked into and were not able to find any corroborating evidence.
> You never actually get a real picture of the facts. Yes, it is a fundamental impossibility in lots of cases. That's why we trust the reporters that they did as good a job as they could to present all pertinent information.
> That title is an editorial ... I do not perceive it to be editorialised. It states an arguably real possibility that Altman may/does have lots of real power. I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation that points towards him being untrustworthy. If that is the case, I think those would be your biases knowing that he is probably not trustworthy. I see it just as an objective question.
Imagine a different situation: you have local elections into your small town. There is a new mayor candidate and during the next term, there will be some money to be given to residents for renovations and such, but not enough for everyone. You don't know this candidate. A local reporter, whom you trust, writes an article "New mayor candidate favoured in polls - will he be fair with the renovation money?". It is a piece trying to shed light on who this candidate is as a person, what was his life before moving into your village, etc. so that voters like you can decide whether to give him your vote. It is not editorialised, as it does not point either way.
Yes.
> that points towards him being untrustworthy.
That points towards the article itself raising a question--which means the article should argue for an answer one way or the other. To ask the question in the title and then not argue for an answer in the article is a cop-out. It's trying to have it both ways.
An article that was simply going to report what was found factually, with no editorialization, would be better done with a title something like "Sam Altman: A look at the career of a key person in AI".
