That doesn't seem quite right to me; if anything, they're tipping their hand as a Democratic newspaper (which expresses itself by acting as if it's responsible for disciplining the Democrats)

It feels to me like what James Comey did: expecting the Democrat to win, thus bending over backwards to not appear biased, to the extent that your behavior becomes biased in the other direction

Yeah agree. I think it's a lot of wanting to be the "right" sort of Democrat, who gets to traffic cop everyone else and say what the savvy party line is. Also, because their readers are so heavily Dem, I suspect these articles get a lot of clicks.

Do you also think of e.g., Fox News as a Democratic media institution, since they're always wall-to-wall criticizing Democrats while going easy on Republicans?