It is an interesting line of thought to consider these compromises and when they may cross the line. Which means are justified by the ends? Which means are not?
The point is that it's not really their back yard. It's a different office on a different floor, possibly even a different subcontracted company than where the journalists are working. They don't have any more scope to be aware of the ad tech than they do understanding how a CDN works.
By analogy, this is kind of like expecting a journalists in the old days to be especially aware of conditions in paper mills because their papers are printed on paper.
How can you talk extensively about the way Facebook does advertising without knowing how its done everywhere else? Doesn't that make you a bad journalist?
By analogy, it'd be like if someone was reporting on how a burger at McDonalds tastes, without having eaten a burger anywhere else.
If you're going to research a topic and some of that research turns up as "Lots of websites run these ad networks" it is a necessary step to ask "do we do that too?".
So there's two options here:
1) The reporter knew the parent company does this.
2) The reporter doesn't know.
In case 1, they either don't talk about it because they are blocked or they don't think it is necessary (which I'd argue is at best misleading and at worst malicious). For case 2, well that just doesn't seem like good reporting.
So I think your analogy doesn't work. It isn't because "people don't know tech" but rather "are journalists asking the right questions and doing good research." If the latter is poor because "they don't know tech" then we have a major problem and as the tech class we need to call them out on it (create a feedback loop to solve the problem).
Buzzfeed has picked up $496 million in VC funding [1] since its inception. It's a catch-22 where they could absolutely have done this reporting without ad-based monetization, but the potential for- ad-based monetization is why the VCs parted with money in the first place.
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/buzzfeed#section-fun...
2. They're reporters... if they don't know what's going on in their own backyard, there's a serious issue.
3. Maybe, but there's something ironic about the fact that this very reporting only exists because of these ad practices. This person most likely wouldn't have a job if the very practice they are reporting on didn't exist.