I think you missed the point regarding whiplash. He's saying journalists should have been more skeptical about these companies all along, and should have dashed in some skepticism into their reporting throughout the last 10 years. Instead, they didn't pay attention to these things until recently, at which point everyone realized there are some things about Facebook and Google which seem questionable. So they waited too long to start looking at these companies critically, and when it became a salient topic and everyone started criticizing Google and Facebook all at once, they also had to jump onto the criticism bandwagon seemingly out of nowhere, causing the readers whiplash.
Does that argument make sense?