I do believe journalists go at it with a mindset of "this is wrong – people will want to know they're being lied to". Witness the "fact checking" trend (which s

I do believe journalists go at it with a mindset of "this is wrong – people will want to know they're being lied to". Witness the "fact checking" trend (which started in the Bush years as a reaction to Karl Rove's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community). Another factor is simply that there's probably nothing that gets a democrats blood pressure to rise quite as much as simply not accepting facts. The first time you're saying "Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me really nervous" and your uncle says "Yeah, you should know that this Ukraine doesn't exist, it's just George Soros' plot to declare martial law in Arkansas" you really get to know how your dog feels when he kinda tilts his head and looks at you. And as soon as the right wing noticed that reaction, they couldn't get enough of it. It's so easy. Just deny the existence of oxygen, or satellites, or the accuracy of unemployment numbers – anything, basically. You'll give ten Harvard PhDs heart attacks with half a sentence of work. That does, however, require a view the right wing that is a bit more pessimistic than I'm completely willing to subscribe to, yet. Because those people would more or less knowingly be destroying any actual discourse, and harming themselves as much as anybody. I'm not sure I can believe in such malice, although one essay that makes this case is somewhat believable. In that view, (parts of) the right wing have basically given up and are now only out to tear everything down (https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/ https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-pr...). Oh, and regarding the original question: the fake-news debate is happening, irregardless of weather that good or bad, and if this guy was really making 6-figures that's a valuable datapoint people should know, and it points at a possible counter-strategy of going after the sources of funding. So yeah, it's very far on the "publish" side of that debate. Also, journalists are quite proud of operating independent of the business side of their publications, so they would at least profess (and honestly believe) that they're not writing such an article in an effort to do anything but inform.