I feel like on some level this is a more round-about way of saying, "real news is politically useful." To me that seems like a fairly obvious reduction of the scope of news into a pure propaganda tool. It is true that a lot of even objective news is inherently political and has political implications, and it is true that which facts reporters choose to print and what context they choose to supply around those facts carries an editorial message regardless of whether the facts are true. What stories a reporter chooses to focus on is itself an editorial decision.

But the quote itself is an oversimplification of that more nuanced truth.

Some more specific objections:

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> Providing evidence counter to the evidence presently the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma.

Commentary is a necessary foundation to empower citizens to form educated opinions and to combat dominant narratives. "Commentary" is not a dirty word, it is a legitimate thing that gets built on top of news reporting and on top of neutrally presented factual information.

Separating reporting from commentary does not delegitimize commentary and it shouldn't be treated as an attempt to delegitimize commentary. Commentary is important, and forcing it to masquerade as news reduces the scope of how we can use it.

And of course there isn't a binary distinction between commentary and reporting (see my first paragraph), but that doesn't mean there's no distinction at all or that different pieces don't stray more towards commentary than others.

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> Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.

The US is a country that is fairly evenly divided between (at least) two very different viewpoints about how the world works, and each side is convinced that the other is stewing in "a one-sided, vacuous environment." I find this argument pretty unconvincing because it's difficult for me to think of many news stories nowadays that don't fit into this category. It doesn't really eliminate much; pretty much all reporting is something that somebody doesn't want printed, and most reporting can be characterized as "establishment propaganda" from people who want to dismiss it.

The hard part of reporting nowadays isn't writing headlines that will make people angry, it's writing headlines that won't be immediately interpreted as a direct political attack. And in pretty much all of those cases, you'll be able to find somebody that doesn't want that headline printed.

And as a quality metric in general, it doesn't seem very useful or strongly correlated with quality. I can print some pretty nonsense, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Conservative establishments angry that it was published. I can also print some pretty nonsensical, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Liberals angry. That's trivial to do, on both sides of the isle. It's trivial to do outside of politics as well --- heck, I can come up with headlines that will make native developers and web developers respectively angry. But doing that doesn't mean that what I'm printing is more likely to be legitimate or newsworthy.

What's worse is that the reduction of "news" to be things that make my out-group angry encourages me to lean into that kind of editorializing; and it encourages me to phrase pretty straightforward announcements/discoveries/research-projects as if they are combative towards my out-groups, even it I have to do worse reporting to make that happen. I would argue that "news has to make people angry" is a big part of how we get incredibly angry, polarized societies in the first place.