> ... cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press ...
Press beholden to the interests of the advertisers is also not free. Granted, it is much less tightly controlled than when a few giant corporation funnel in most ad money, but still.
> The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies.
Well, the traditional press has also promoted conspiracy theory and lies: Most prominent in the last two decades, and in NYT specifically, have been Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction and Trump's supposed collusion with Russia. The difference is that, on Facebook, there is less control of which lies and conspiracy theories get promoted and which get suppressed. It seems the author of that column takes issue with this.
Having said that - I do agree with the thesis of Facebook (and perhaps Google?) being a significant source of revenue for a media outlet meaning it has a measure of control over that outlet. Unfortunately, in Capitalism (especially less-regulated Capitalism) this tends to happen all over.
> these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help.
Huh? The economy in general and mass media in particular have been driving smaller and local news outlets out of business for decades before Facebook was popular.
Ben Bagdikian famously wrote about the dangerous concentration of (news) media already in 1983, see coverage here:
https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0810/081003.html
Or check out the book on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mediamonopoly00bagd