[dsfyu404ed]

Alternatively: "there's so few of you that the cost of adding yet another set of laws to our compliance routine is greater than the revenue you'd generate".

Online publishing is low margin and this appears to be a local news station so it probably does make sense from a strict business perspective. I wouldn't be surprised if they're outsourcing compliance auditing and GDPR is a check box that cost money so they just chose to block instead. You don't need to assume questionable ethics when there's a perfectly ethical business case. Sure it would be nice if online news wasn't monetized with our data but that's not the world we live in you can't blame a local news station for not trying to be the ones to challenge the status quo.