It is about spam. There are actually many flavors of spam and they each need their own spam detector. For example parked domain spam vs. adult content spam vs. copycat site spam vs. content-farm spam vs. news spam.

This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here.

However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam.

And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."