It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.

It didn't become, just suppressing what was already there is gone.

American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.

This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era: it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism" helps no-one except the bosses.

The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose.

Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.

Speaking of, the political compass places 2020 Trump as somewhat more authoritarian than 2020 Biden, and barely more on the right :

https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020