Journalists history is full of people that break the law in order to investigate something and the result is almost in every case the same: they get a small fin

Journalists history is full of people that break the law in order to investigate something and the result is almost in every case the same: they get a small fine which the news paper pays. To take a direct example, a Swedish TV crew smuggled a person through several nations in order to report on experience a person went through during the migration crisis. The maximum punishment for human smuggling is 6 years in Sweden (and this is not counting all the other countries which this TV crew traveled through), and the verdict was of course a small fine (basically one month of pay) after going through two courts. When you have a person with no priors, low risk for repeat offense of the specific crime they are accused of, for the intent of journalist reporting, and a single offense, what you get is a small fine. The US do not do extraditions from other nations when the expected punishment is a small fine.