Reuters operates more like an NGO than a private company. It's the British version of its American equivalent AP.

Technically it's private, but so are all NGOs. Doesn't mean they don't do odd politically motivated things that no normal private company would do with a plain profit motive.

Now we see here that sometimes having more than a plain profit motive is worse. It can be. It just means different. People act like having a profit motive is the worst thing possible, but it's really not. You can do worse.

You could operate as a quasi state-sponsored news agency with connections to multiple governments and shill propaganda for them while pretending to be the very core institution of respectable journalism. But this is just a way to make the lines of "respectable journalism" equivalent to the agencies that will jump when a government says jump.