This kind of nonsense is at the heart of a lot of our problems. Yes, someone producing interesting content and making it available widely should be paid for their labour and expenses. But the marginal cost of each reader is very close to zero, unlike the candy. The root cause of the disconnect is greed; where people believe the extra value massive scalability in tech offers should just accrue to them directly as a seller, trying to drive per-unit margins back up towards the money they would get from selling a newspaper.

If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.