The question of whether money affects coverage is among those which are incredibly difficult to find evidence for without a smoking gun. There's no direct proof in whether a given story supports or hurts a financier. I'm stretching for an example but there is circumstantial evidence the interactions between various macro ecosystems push conditions of earth's biosphere toward homeostasis, but suggesting this is deterministic is not substantiated by any known directly testable phenomena. Until we decode latent genetic algorithms, it'll remain speculation. Likewise we're left only with speculation in the absence of an explicit, "run story or we pull funding" type memo.
That said a lot of economics tends to make sense when examined through a lens of incentives. There has been an observable shift toward radicalization of news content since this article indicates FB began funding its news feature. Opinion pieces seem to often displace primary stories based on whether they suit a dominant hyperbolic narrative. Whether by FB design or simply a natural response to the soaring appeal of hyperbolic click bait favored by social news aggregation is anybody's guess.
I will say I am appalled by a lack of accountability the Times has had over the last year. For example regularly publishing summary statistics without acknowledging significant sampling problems, figures any self-respecting statistician would never consider submitting for academic review are still regularly passed off as fact. Moreover discourse regarding what constitutes effective policy, consideration of cost and benefit, or even determination of what society's goals are let alone whether they are realistic has been contemptuously derided as conspiracy and dogma of the Trumpian cult. Without rational discourse there is little hope for progress, and in that regard I arrived at my own foregone conclusions, that the hyperbolic nature of news media is one of the most significant barriers to positive change we face as a society.
On that note, if you find yourself buying into a fear of outsiders you might want to reconsider the fact most people share the same fundamental values and our differences between one another is often negligible. Believe it or not beyond the lazy opinions about issues scantly related to every day life, the average liberal and conservative have exactly the same amount of love for their friends and family. We often simply disagree regarding the means to similar ends. As a single global society we all face the same problems, but our biggest problem right now is spanning the distance we've created between coming together socially as friends and colleagues.