This was maybe true in the 80s and 90s, but I am not so sure it is true right now.
Every media criticism podcast I listen to stresses the adage, "It is better to be loved by a small, devoted audience that loves you mostly because you are hated than it is to try to appeal to everybody. The former is pretty stable work and pretty lucrative, all things considered, while the latter will please absolutely nobody and goes nowhere."
Our culture nationally is just not based on broad consensuses and shared experiences anymore. People of different walks of life are living very different geographical, technological, social, and economic lives.
CF is a great example of that -- a boutique establishment, sure, but it has a small and dedicated fanbase that supports it and its advertisers in lean times. I think CW and the team do good and fair journalism, but it is impossibly not to notice it is written from the perspective of Iowa State fans for Iowa State fans. CW and the team will be critical of Pollard and the coaches from time-to-time when it is truly warranted and something is broken, but only in the most fair and reasoned ways while giving ample opportunity for those figures to voice their own point of view about such criticisms.
The young man in the OP bringing his Hawkeye homerism into journalism is, well, how journalism is increasingly working nowadays. It is less about being a neutral arbiter of information flows than advocating an explicit position. And I have no problem with that, by the way, but (1.) people need to understand we are back to the prewar media model of outlets having a team, (2.) outlets should just drop the pretense that they do not have a team, like CF has, and (3.) if an outlet pretends to be neutral when it is clearly not, it should not be surprised it gets dinged for its hypocrisies.
