Hacker News Reader

He has a potential motive to lie or to distort the truth. Or maybe he has not, but an outside observer cannot know it for sure. So if he will speak freely he will become a target of attacks based on his supposed hidden motivation, and it can happen without regard to his real impartiality.

So probably more than half of his household income comes from Apple, so there's a conflict of interest. The ethical choice is not to "try to be neutral", but simply to acknowledge that someone else who actually is neutral is more qualified to report on that topic.

It's like how judges should recuse themselves from cases where they have a stock portfolio including one party to the case.

That makes sense, thank you.

Yeah that's weird. Like, maybe they should have gotten someone else to do the story if the reporter couldn't have done a full job of it?