Your mistake here is the assumption that “journalism” is what’s being discussed here. The Mary Sue is not a news organization and has never purported itself to be one, and the pieces submitted to it by Ankucic and by other people are not pieces of investigative journalism, often they are just opinion pieces and editorials. By their very nature, opinion pieces and editorials are biased. So if the major revelation here is “The Mary Sue runs biased content”, well, that ain’t news. No matter which side of the fence you’re on, the notion that a website, whose main draw is editorialized content of a particular political slant, may be biased is not, or at the very least should not be surprising. Anti-feminists already believed it anyway, and feminists don’t care.

So Ankucic “exposed” something that was already widely known to an audience that didn’t need convincing. And to do so, he submitted two articles, written in bad faith, under false credentials, taking advantage of people that were perhaps too willing to extend to him the benefit of the doubt. That’s something that a liar does. Then, he wrote this article bragging about lying, bragging about receiving a paycheck for the lies that he told, and bragging about his intention to lie again and to profit from his lying again. These are not the actions of a renegade investigator determined to expose the truth at any cost, these are the actions of a liar. I’d be slightly more convinced of Ankucic’s altruistic intentions had he, for example, refused to accept payment for the articles he wrote in bad faith. Instead, he proudly declared that the next time he makes $1000 off this scam, he’ll be back to brag about it some more.

The problems that you speak of pertaining to large media websites using click-bait tactics to boost their numbers are real, and no one with an even slightly critical eye would ever deny that. Again, this is not news. Ankucic is not working from within the system to dismantle it, he’s actively profiting off of it. At best, he is part of the problem. He submitted two articles with political views that he openly admits aren’t his own for the specifically stated purpose of getting published and generating income for himself. In these actions, he’s demonstrating that his ideological integrity is for sale if the price is right. And for this, he is cheered on by people claiming to stand for ethics in journalism, people who would just as soon cheer for a pile of dog turds arranged to spell “feminists are the real sexists”. He is admitting to being a liar who profits off of a flawed system, and he is doing so proudly.