The newsroom is a different part of thr company than the legal department. Plus, sometimes your company does something that's newsworthy! Just like all journalism, there's always implicit bias. No reason to get suspicious about a news organization covering the news.

If Apple is in a lawsuit I'm not going to go to the Apple media relations page for the story. What about the NYT, also a for-profit company, makes it more principled than Apple, other than that they say they are?

The NY Times company has an analogue to the Apple media relations page: https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/

In most respected media companies there is a really-important-to-journalists-who-work-there firewall between these sorts of corporate battles and the reporting on them.

Reading an article where you assume the author is biased is not so bad. What’s bad is finding an alternative source and reading it as if the author IS unbiased.

One should always source news from a variety of outlets as to attempt to be cognizant of the biases in play and to see the story from many viewpoints.

Would I trust the NYT to be unbiased? No. But is their viewpoint extremely relevant to the subject at hand? Yes.

The NYT also hallucinates from time to time: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-...

(That's a story about Jayson Blair, one of their reporters who just plain made up stories and sources for months before getting caught)

Edit: Sheesh, even their apology is paywalled. Wiki background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair?wprov=sfla1