Maybe it's because one is an online bazaar of Chinese plastic crap that uses dark patterns to get people to sign up, and the other is a news organization that doesn't?

There's no obvious reason to suspect a political motivation. That Amazon is an enormous retailer, and newspapers are not, seems like rather sufficient explanation for why the Federal Trade Commission might pay more attention to one than the other.

I'm glad they're going after the 800 lb gorilla. Then maybe all the 100 lb chimpanzees and orangutans will take notice.

There are ~10 million NYT subscribers. There are ~160 million Amazon Prime subscribers.

Bad practices by NYT impact 3% of Americans. Bad practices by Amazon impact 48% of Americans.

You can be cynical and say that going after Amazon is political because more voters are impacted, but at the end of the day it seems reasonable to go after the biggest target where the biggest impact can be made to benefit Americans.