Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?

That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"