[aussiesnack]

No. "Critical" (in the defensible sense) reporting of breakthroughs would involve checking of the science behind the breakthrough, probing the ethics and finances, etc. Ideally this should always be how tech journalism is conducted, otherwise it actually isn't journalism at all, it's just PR or trade writing. With fast news cycles this may not be practical for every single column cm, but it must be the default.

"Critical" in the pop sense (making a worthiness judgement) is not altogether avoidable, but it should be marginal in journalism. This is what Opinion is for.

What Yglesias & Piper are saying, in effect, is that the NYT made a top-down directive that tech coverage should be negatively-slanted Opinion.