That's not how I remember the event. The fact that "people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing" played no role, as far as I know. Newspapers wrote about the Sokal-Bricmont story, not because they were concerned as gatekeepers, but because it was a spectacular hoax. I was in academia at the time, and it was widely discussed.

The hoax intended to show two facts:

- Philosophy and social studies sometimes have an unsuitable fascination for science, with a tendency to wrongly apply scientific concepts they don't understand. Some impostors had perfect fame in their academic domain, despite writing this pseudo-scientific gibberish.

- Scientific journals were supposed to publish provable or reproducible articles, so when a flawed article went through the publishing process, there was hope the errors would be detected and other articles would fix it. And a publication in a top-tier journal would bring intense scrutiny. In philosophy and social science, nonsense could get published, widely accepted, and even studied.

BTW, I remember Jean Bricmont telling how much he liked good philosophy, and how he was pained when reading fraudulent philosophy.