Absolutely! What business starts out antagonizing half its customers? The only reason they got away with it for as long as they did was because of their near-monopoly of paper information distribution.
One other point. Conventional wisdom says that the Drive-By Media was relatively unbiased until about 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not so sure about that. I opine that they've always been biased but until recent years, there was no way to counter it.
Well they may have been biased around 1960, but there were many which were biased to the right. They had a tendency to be the afternoon papers, which were read on mass transit commutes, and which were devastated by evening news broadcasts, which changed from 15 minutes of national and 15 minutes of local news, weather and sports. to the current 30 minutes and 30 to 60 minute broadcasts. Also everyone started commuting by automobile, where, hopefully, they were NOT reading the paper.
The NY Daily news was right wing, as was the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis News, the Phoenix Gazette, the St. Louis Globe Democrat and the Oakland Tribune, along with most Hearst papers. The NY Herald Tribune was the great standard bearer for centrist (RINO) and liberal Republicans. Almost all Florida papers, other than the Miami Herald, were conservative to far right. There were hundreds of other non-liberal papers around the country.