You're setting up a straw man. Google's 'favorite' site was CNN, ending up as 11% of all impressions, nearly twice as high as any other single site. Quantitatively CNN has seen their viewership plunging to the point that they now have well under a million primetime viewers. [1] Their results on Alexa [2] show a similar online trend, and that is very much in spite of the fact that Google is constantly 'recommending' them which provides is providing a major inorganic boost to their traffic.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2018/05/30/fox-news...