“...infamously touted...”
Stopped reading right there.
“Infamously,” indeed! The only thing infamous here is the bias in this story.
I wrote and edited for newspapers for 25 years. There’s no way I would have pulled such a stunt. You leave the editorializing for the editorial page.
One practice of old-school editors was an aversion to any adjectives and adverbs in news copy. My take was to use them sparingly, if at all.