It's not really advertising when the user is specifically searching for news content. That's like saying the halibut fisherman is getting free advertising when you go to a restaurant and ask to see the menu.
That's not a good analogy because news sites don't sell their articles to Google, they get paid when users visit their sites. Google is promoting their websites and actively directing users to them, for free. Do I need to pay NYT when I recommend an article to my friends?
It's certainly not the greatest analogy - it's just meant to claim that you can't advertise something that someone's already looking for, including when you only know they're looking for it because they came to you asking for it. Google isn't doing any promotion, they're simply forwarding on the most accurate indexed page according to your query. Promotion and advertising would be generating demand that otherwise wouldn't exist, which is not the case in this scenario. You can argue Google is promoting one page over another, but for every page that's at the top, there's a page that's at the bottom, and so it's not generally promoting the collective news media in any way.