I find it very helpful to know if a news source has some kind of agenda. They may be more likely to use statements out of context or to suppress facts, biased towards one side of a dispute. I'm not saying that is the case here, but we are talking about the NYT vs a site I hadn't heard of until today.
This isn't ad hominem, it's directly related to the topic at hand (ethics, motivations in journalism). Ad hominem doesn't mean the mistakes of the past can't be mentioned, it means that character flaws can't.