These websites did not get blocked by the EU. These websites chose to block themselves because they did not want to put in the effort to be GDPR compliant.
Also when it comes to random news websites (especially smaller local ones) what sort risks are there? The aren’t handling your personal information and if you’re afraid about them selling your browsing history to third parties there are way to fix that locally
The sites themselves disagree with you. They think there's risk, which is why they decided to not work in the EU. EU does not "threaten very high fines" to sites that do not collect PII. GDPR does nothing if you don't collect information. But they obviously do collect it, despite your denial.
Of course the site owners think there it introduces unnecessary risks for them, that was more or less what my initial comment was about.
> But they obviously do collect it, despite your denial.
How? are you somehow compelled to share you name and address with random local/small new-sites from the US
They very likely are just using ads and/or analytics services which technically don’t comply with GDPR..
How else than technically should they comply with the GDPR? Morally? They don't do that either. They gather as much as possible and deduce as much as possible from it. Are you actually claiming services like Google Analytics aren't interested in knowing much about a site's visitors?