I agree with your statement here, the person who is calling it malware is misusing the term.
In order for it to be classified as malware you need to prove that it’s intentionally being malicious, which from the provided evidence is unable to be done. in fact every step of evidence has been in the opposite direction, just because it gives potentially invalid information from its source doesn’t mean that the bot is malware, the intent is noble, regardless if the information is fully valid or not. You can call the website malware if you like(although that’s still a hard stretch) but the bot wouldn’t be malware, it’s working as intended and doing the job exactly as it described it would be,which is using the website to determine credibility of articles.