I mostly agree, but I think there was a bit of a difference in quality up until about 15 years ago.

This was due to the nature of the competition between news outlets. It you have only few suppliers in any domain, then a possibility of a "price war" is relatively small. It's much easier to predict how our counterparts will behave and dumping prices hurts all the participants. It forces the competition to move to different areas - like marketing and quality of service.

Once there were more competitors, due to the internet being a thing, all bets were off. No one could hold to their position just because he was considered more reliable by a marginal degree.