I always thought that mainstream media sites with paywalls were pretty far down there in the tier list of websites though. Not sure if this analogy lands unless irony was the goal.
What I do not see is the irony you insinuate in your post. It is not immoral to charge people for content, nor does that make you less credible. (It might even make you more credible since you now earn money by having happy customers instead of serving more ads.)
Some news sources are not trustworthy but that's independent of there being a paywall.