There's plenty of content available for "free." There's also plenty of music available for free by musicians who play or donate. There's an assumption in your comment that all content requires some sort of compensation and I don't think that's true, and certainly not necessary for a strong society.

I think this may influence your other assumption that it's unethical to freely consume content. The article author uses the example of walking through a city and refusing to look at billboards, but still taking in the view of beautiful architecture. Do you abandon ethics to view architecture?

Imagine if the business models of all the businesses in those buildings depended on you looking at the ads. Would you abandon ethics to walk down the street?

I think there are some people who are ambivalent if every record label and movie studio shuts down. I don't really care as there is lots of art that is created by people who like giving it away for free. Ever since the start of the net, I've structured my livelihood to specifically avoid being in the business of extracting income from IP. So I think I'm pretty well hedged against people going against their behavior to pay for my IP.

I think reporters can be compensated in much better ways than ads, and I actually think that journalism will be better off if not ad supported. Part of the problem we have now is because ads and truth aren't really aligned with the same incentives so I see lots of news sites going more toward ads.