Negative. The article is astroturfing. Far from "knee jerk reactions," what you are seeing here is genuine disgust with FT's obvious shill article.
I tried seeing who owned shares in The Financial Times and while I'm still looking to see if Microsoft does (or if they own shares in the parent company, kind of like how Microsoft purchased shares from the London Stock Exchange whose parent company owns Reuters), I did find that Microsoft wanted to buy a ton of shares in Softbank Group.
The only connection between FT and Softbank is I came across is through Nikkei Inc: Nikkei Inc owns The Financial Times, and Nikkei reported on Microsoft (and other Big Tech) companies looking to buy up to $70 billion combined shares in Softbank Group's Visions Fund a few years ago. In 2021, Softbank Group offloaded billions of dollars into purchasing stock of Big Tech American companies including, obviously, Microsoft Corp.
Basically, any ties between Microsoft and The Financial Times are unknown, at least to me. Nikkei Inc. owns the FT but Japanese law prevents corporations from owning newspaper companies (they aren't publicly traded). So Microsoft couldn't have shares in them even if they wanted to. Could they have an inside person at Nikkei or Financial Times though? It's possible. Dunno if Japanese law prevents privately owned newspaper companies from investing in publicly-traded corporations, but I don't think there's a law preventing individuals at such a company from owning investments or shares in other companies.
I also don't know if that law extends to the FT because even though Nikkei Inc. owns them, FT are based in Britain, so wouldn't they be under British law in terms of if they can be publicly traded or not? Could also be that Microsoft & FT and/or Nikkei (or people from those companies) have mutually shared investments i.e investments in the same company, entity etc. But that's some deep investigation type of stuff, I wouldn't even know where to start.