Absolutely it does. The prevailing narrative is that SV tech companies are innovators in this space, invading your privacy in ways that normal companies would never dream of. "Facebook engages in industry standard data collection" is a very different story, even if the industry standard is still bad.
However the parent's claim is subtly different: it states that the industry practice of data collection is not unusual, not that it's not wrong.
How do you figure? It seems to me that even if the news organization does everything Facebook/Google/etc. does, that doesn't make Facebook/Google/etc. less bad. It only makes the news organization equally bad.
If everyone else also violates privacy in the same ways, this aspect of the narrative isn't true.
Reality is, that both Google and Facebook have cleaned up the AD industry ( but not enough, of course ).
Data brokers continue to be the worst actors in the Ad industry.