I think there's room to be charitable and that most people don't see a meaningful distinction between "sell ads based on your data" and "sell your data to people to use in ads".
This is often the problem of journalists not consulting experts on topics like these (although, a case could be made that the scale they had to adapt to with the Internet forced them to churn out news stories too quickly to get an expert for every story). They can still write an article about this problem (because targeted advertising is considered a problem to most people and/or NPR wants to make more people aware of it) but nuance is important and saying they 'sell your data' isn't misinformation I would want spread.
That's a circular argument. If journalists actually understood the distinction and explained it, more people would see the distinction after reading their articles.
