We are talking about a bit of different things.

For Meta, or other big company that have data centres, when you received a link you "share" they can basically crawl entire page (cause the visual pop ups that ask you to subscribe or please turn off ad blocker won't work for bots.) They can have rotating instances so they are never under the 2 free articles per day limit. For lemmy as long as we don't pre-cache contents, we should be fine as pure links are driving traffic. But on facebook you can expand and read like almost entire articles or click the "read more, source" something like that.

Now back to protect these media company. It is sort of important to have a government funded, NPO run neutral media.(cause we still have a lot of older people that only read news paper and watch TVs.) The rest actually didn't matter that much. Everyone can have their own bias, but why normalize that bias through news media? Shouldn't be news just stay as news that reports facts(5W 1H) and leave those "opinions" to whatever other blogs or entirely different non-government funded companies?

So, why should the government protects/helps news agencies that their primary goal is profit and selling their eye ball time and whatever owner's political bias? Because it helps those that are currently in government?