I don't mean to say that false neutrality is some sort of conspiracy or something on behalf of NBC to protect their bottom line. I think it's something lazy writers do to protect themselves when they're doing surface-level stories about things they didn't bother to spend much time researching. They probably don't know the specifics of the accusations because they were buried in a 3 hour long video.

If you don't bother researching something, it makes sense to hedge a bit if you have to stake your reputation on it. On the one end you get a kind of weak article like this, but on the other you could end up at the center of something nasty. Of course all of that could be remedied with a smidge of journalistic integrity but 🤷‍♀️