Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, let's look at a scenario. If a board member of a powerful pharmaceutical company was also a chief executive at a news organization responsible for "fact-checking" claims about that company's medicines, would it be inappropriate to wonder about financial incentives?
You seem to only be looking at the surface of this issue. I agree that it is appropriate to be concerned about conflict of interest, but what happens when you take it one step further beyond your comment? I decide to "do my own research" and plug the drug's name into Google. The top site that comes up is the same news organization's fact check because no one else has a financial incentive to investigate this issue an…
It’s fundamentally an epistemological question: what is the ontological basis for thinking we know something?