I've seen the same pattern of burying the bad news inside a piece in many other places besides journalism. It's commonplace in government reports and studies, especially in the contrast between the executive summary, and what the body actually says. I remember a NASA panel's report on the loss of the two Mars probes in the late 90s, in which the executive summary seemed to say that it just happened and nobody was to blame; while in the body the report quite clearly pointed out that lack of sufficient funding had stressed the people and the system past their reasonable limits and made mistakes inevitable. The executive summary said "Faster, Better, Cheaper" worked just fine; while the body said "no it didn't!".

Extremes like that have to be taken as evidence of deliberate deception, but I agree that under most ordinary circumstances what we see is just inevitable differences in worldview and perceptions. That's why, for me, the only reasonable interpretation of charges like "liberal bias" or "conservative bias" is just "a bias that's not mine".