Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)
Just imagine, how content publishing and journalism alone would have developed, if publishers wouldn't be cut off by the advertising cartel of Google and Facebook.
Or if they would have rubbed 2 brain cells together in 2005 and actually tried to come up with an attractive web presence.
It's like the news media saw what was happening with music and napster/the internet and thought, "Glad that could never happen to us" and went right back to the printing press to fire off the next day's issue.