Google writes PR pieces. I don't see why you should trust news articles more than PR pieces, except as links to other sources that you can check yourself like scientific articles or government agencies with data.
> The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it?
You can make legally protected news organizations, and that anyone who doesn't follow those rules isn't allowed to call themselves a news site with journalists. Instead they'd be forced to call themselves opinion writers or bloggers. That way you still have the freedom of expression but lets the public clearly see who follows the basic rules of independent reporting.
No, that's a publisher. "News" describes the product, not the method of operation. Has the war on words been so successful that Americans univerally consider e.g. Cosmo "news" now?
The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it? Well, that's a news organisation. It's not that you necessarily trust any one individual publisher, it's that a range of views are freely represented in the press generally.
The Chinese constitution used to guarantee free speech, but the massive disconnect between what the constitution said and what was actually allowed was so gargantuan it became a bit of an embarrassment in the post-Tiananmen era. Since then the constitution has been revised extensively to be less blatantly contrary to reality.
Totally incidental aside, but one of the inciting incidents for constitutional revision was a court case brought by a person fired from their job for being short, where the actual job had no real requirement for them being any particular height. They won the case based on the constitution's barring discrimination, but the fact that a court had granted a right to someone based on the constitution was so novel and unheard of that it caused massive conniptions in the CCP.