Kerning is more about the spacing between individual letters in words. This isn't really an example of bad kerning, just one of the stylistic decision to use justified text alignment. This will evenly space out the individual words based on the amount of space in the line, making for a tight fit up against the edges and clean column edges.

Sure, some people dislike this style and/or find it more difficult to read. But I personally think it does make newspaper columns a lot cleaner and relatively evenly fills out the space.

Modern software will have options to fine tune the minimum and maximum spacing, and when it should choose to hyphenate words across lines to reduce inconsistencies in spacing. Publisher is great for this... Make some really beautiful documents.