The idea that paid is better than free is just a joke of a position and I think you can quite easily deconstruct it yourself. Pick some free news source that’s broadly inoffensive, like the free episodes of some shitty podcast or something. However lacking you and I might find it, are we really going to say that it’s worse than whatever Exclusive Content can be raked up from paying subscriptions to Crowder or Molyneux or Alex Jones or some other reactionary cultist? Are we really saying that the paid version of Breitbart is a much better source than some lib shithead’s Twitter feed? Do you even know what yellow journalism is or that tabloids sell by subscription?
Get away for a second from words like “quality” that are epistemically messy and consider the market incentives: What any subscription service wants is for people to subscribe and then stay subscribed. This is what they invest their money in and anything else is either wholly secondary or based on a different revenue stream (like ad revenue, sponsorship, or grants).
Does this forbid them from putting out “high-quality” news? No, not necessarily, but it seems that the “quality” of the news is secondary to whatever keeps the subscription paid month to month. Alex Jones displays an excellent example of one of the most salient investments for these businesses: Fostering dependency. Through his conspiracism, he promotes the idea that listening to his program and only his program allows the viewer to be largely free of whatever “satanic vampire brainwashing” he warns them about. Andrew Tate does the same thing, he just calls it the “Matrix”. However, this is only one approach, and there are many other ways to get your audience to believe that yours is either the only service or one of a narrow range of services worth having, and all the self-flattering that goes on in liberal journalism should tip you off that the neoliberal press behaves almost like a guild, hostile to independent journalists and relatively friendly to those who have the same agenda or the same corporate masters. One can look at any of those bullshit “bias” charts and see how they equate centrism with being “free of bias,” which is simply absurd on its face.
Since they are optimizing for subscription and retention, one of their biggest threats is damage to their reputation. If a paper is operating out of the US and mostly to US customers, this has an effect that people don’t address often enough: The most dangerous thing to these papers short of the government or rioters shutting down their offices are other major powers in US-consumed media attacking them in a way that discredits them to their own target demographic. Bigger newspapers tend to be very siloed in terms of their audiences, so it’s not a huge deal if Fox attacks the NYT or CNN attacks the Sun – usually – but by its very nature this means there is only a very limited extent to which they can oppose the US government before the government becomes serious about retaliating, and thereby enlists all of the other major media outlets in retaliating. Trump flirted with this but never fully committed because the attacks on him specifically were literally part of his appeal to his own base, and these attacks never questioned the broader structures of power represented by the WH itself or the two-party system.
Oh yeah, and there’s the adjacent matter of “Access Journalism.” You know what makes the news a lot? Big and powerful institutions. If you want to do interviews with people who are either being reported on by other outlets or have information pertinent to a story being reported by other outlets, you better have a track record of being friendly in your coverage, or you’ll be denied the interview!
Overwhelmingly, being a big media company making its money on subscriptions does create a bias, not towards “higher” or “lower” quality, but towards being friendly to the structures of power that the company is based in and reporting on!