You have to see this through 90's lens: back then the media wasn't nearly as polarized, and the public had much greater trust in news networks, especially in CNN. "Fake news" was mostly relegated to the domain of conspiracy theories, and blatant promotions of political agendas as neutral news wouldn't fly back then (although, of course, the networks did have an agenda and did promote it, but they were... much more subtle and civil about the whole thing).
In the 90's the bias was shown in the stories they choose to cover and what they choose to ignore not in the coverage itself
this is still true today but now in addition to this bias there is almost zero "strait" reporting, everything has political commentary mixed in, some more subtle than others but it is still there. Even in places like APnews where it is more subtle
