Presumably, if they put it before a review board, that board would have found that correcting people's misunderstanding of the facts of topic X is not unethical

Presumably, if they put it before a review board, that board would have found that correcting people's misunderstanding of the facts of topic X is not unethical. Regardless of what one thinks of public "debunking" generally, the position of most in academia seems to be that telling people their news sources are not sound science, is not unethical.