My perspective: left/right orientation is strongly correlated with population density where someone grew up. The countryside produces humble self-reliant people, the city produces vain/envious government-reliant people. Demographics do not matter, the city creates leftists out of any demographic.
In the countryside it can normally take a government police car, fire truck, ambulance a hour to show up, so people live largely on their own and fend for themselves, while response times in the city can be minutes. In the country if someone buys a brand new tractor or builds a big new barn, it's mostly out of sight and out of mind of their neighbors, while in a city if someone buys a new SUV or builds a McMansion the neighbors go bonkers with envy seeing it every day
In the old days newspapers were balanced because America's population density was less. You can read very old New York Times articles at their archive and they are amazingly balanced. Today they are over the top leftist. What changed? The city grew until all newspaper workers within commute distance grew up in high population density. They couldn't hire a balanced newsroom if they wanted to.
Today most news is produced by city slickers, so the news has a heavy leftist bias. The internet though is a game changer. Cities no longer serve as the information hubs they once were. News can be gathered and distributed from anywhere now, and more cheaply so away from high density population centers. Conservatives need to build news businesses outside of the cities and out compete the vain urbanites.
When you say, “very old,” I assume you mean “very, very, old.” Per Wikipedia:In 1896, Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times, a money-losing newspaper, and formed the New York Times Company. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The New York Times ever since.. . .
The Times has been criticized for reporter Walter Duranty's, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936, series of stories written in 1931 on the Soviet Union. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time, however he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly the Ukraine famine in the 1930s. In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."