Consumer Reports will also inform you of things like this in advance, if you look. (For this and 100 other reasons, It's worth paying for a digital sub.)
Consumer Reports reporting is bought and paid for by the OEMs. They'll make a big issue out of nothing or minimize real issues depending on where the money is coming from.
This goes back at least as far as the Samurai rollover scandal.
Pretty much all industry journalism where the journalists depend on being in the good graces of the manufacturers to get the access they need to make their content is like this.
i don't know how you can say they play favorites. internal memos show that suzuki knew that they had a rollover issue because of the narrow wheelbase and CR called them out on it through testing.
The vehicle proved to be equal or less rollover prone than the competition (especially the Bronco II which IIRC holds the record for the most rolled over vehicle) in actual service and per the stats compiled over the years by the NHTSA
So it really kind of begs the question what axe CR was grinding. In the lawsuit it came out that one of the writers managed to put it on two wheels incidentally not part of the tests and that they monkeyed with the tests they were running to try and replicate that.