I've known this since the 90's and it wasn't much of a secret back then even. The Editor in Chief of the Local rag gave a presentation in a media relations course I was taking. He asked us what the #1 job of the newspaper was. The answers ran the typical gauntlet of reporting the truth and various iterations of that theme. He stunned most of the class by telling us that those were all good, altruistic and naive answers; but they were all wrong. The #1 job of the newspaper is to sell newspapers!
Samuel Clemens told us as much 100 years ago: "If you don't read the paper, you're uninformed. If you do read the paper, you're misinformed"
