In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right.
That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
“Other places are further left” seems irrelevant to this discussion.
Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!
In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
But a bias towards centrist American politics doesn't mean a lack of bias — far from it.
For example, 30 years ago a "centrist" report on global warming might have given equal space to right-wing and liberal perspectives, even though the vast majority of scientists at the time sided with liberals on the facts.
20-ish years ago a centrist report on Iraq would have parroted the administration's lies about WMDs and the urgency of going to war. And the New York Times was one of those organisations!
They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]
That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
The press has a lot of problems right now:
* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.
* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.
* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.
IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
This has more or less always been the case.
Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.