One of the challenges here is that there are a lot of explanations that might be completely reasonable that cover all of the weirdness, but it feels like there's too much of it.
I think, if one wants to inform people, one should not claim things that require accepting the reasoning without thought.
So even if the NYT article weren't propaganda and all the claims were correct, it would still be problematic, since writing it in this way, effectively claims that things that look like propaganda are legitimate journalism and totally normal.
So even if it were correct, someone who reads it and begins to accept articles of the same kind has been brought into a state of not being to reason critically about reality, and creating that cannot ever be ethical journalism.
