> I don't know if they left out those facts because it didn't fit with the tone of the magazine of if they failed to do their research properly
> I came to the conclusion that it was the former
OP is explicit that they left out facts that didn't "fit the tone of their magazine". That's pretty much the definition of cherry picking. And leaving out facts always has the advantage of falling back on plausible deniability.
OP's assertion was that the literature review didn't went as deep as he felt like it should with regards to a single data point.
That's not remotely comparable to cherry picking.