There may very well be 0 web developers on the staffs of these newspapers. They could have bought 3rd party software, or they could have paid a consulting compa

There may very well be 0 web developers on the staffs of these newspapers. They could have bought 3rd party software, or they could have paid a consulting company to build a custom news site. In either case, your simple fix is not so simple. Even knowing that not setting cookies for EU users could be a high bar, and actually implementing is far out of reach. Say they go to the original consultant, who tells them they can pay $xx,000 to have GDPR compliance, or $x,000 to block EU users. Hopefully this starts making more sense. GDPR looks easy to comply with if you imagine you work for the newspaper. Instead, imagine that you literally are the person who currently works for the newspaper and it will become a bit more clear why they've made the decisions they've made.