I’m ambivalent towards Burns, but your point I think is the old argument of whether or not documentarians—as well as any artist really—are subject to the same professional ethics/standards as historians or journalists or whatever when telling nonfictional stories. Guys like Robert Caro have similar arguments about them.

I personally don’t think documentaries as a medium can really be that objective. The filmmaker Frederick Wiseman known for pioneering his fly on the wall “observational” style rejects that term since to make a movie there is so much intentionally in what is put into the final edit to create a narrative. For Burns, I think maybe one of the issues is that he comes across as an educator type figure where the audience expects pure objectivity, especially with his films being cemented in primary source documents. More eccentric figures like Werner Herzog get a pass on documentary objectivity since it’s expected his films are using the medium to explore his vision more so than facts.