All journalism is and has always been "advocacy" journalism. Often people don't notice the so-called advocacy as it is usually for the unjust status quo in an unquestioning, fully compromising subservient manner, I'd add.
Perhaps, as you say, it was always thus at least in terms of bias of intent, but there seems something qualitatively different between the yellow press of yore (where stories were made up) and the press that is now in a world so awash in news stories that any "channel" can deploy its bias solely via story selection, i.e., it can lie using nothing but truth. Take that one phrase you selected to comment upon; it is entirely true that I wrote it, and it would be entirely legitimate to disagree with it in and of itself were it the point, but that phrase was a member of a series of supporting elements in an argument that polarization, a marker for societal strain, is proceeding on our watch. As Camille Paglia wrote, "...history's far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, ... as they become more complex and interconnected they also become more vulnerable to collapse." Polarization, that sublimation of the middle, is my point, and to go one step further, technologic progress is its engine. N.B., we are now waist deep in a rat hole. --dan