I've been reading the Times for a few decades. The Times slants their articles, or they usually ignore stories if it doesn't fit the party line. For example, they ignore the work of John Lott, the author of "More Guns, Less Crime", and they avoided the Swiftees until they couldn't be ignored any longer.
The author has a reputation to maintain. Maybe the article would have been spiked if the docs in question doing the research were white males. Nonsense like Jayson Blair and his fiction is the exception.
But it's not the same newspaper since Pinch took over and Rosenthal was fired. Your image of the NYT may be colored by those other decades, not the current version.