there is a struggle with accepting that being the "integrity wing" means we have to do the whole integrity thing. but also like you say, the response is what made this into A Big Discourse! id bet all my money if the article was ignored for 4 days the discourse wouldve disappeared!!
a response as simple as "being a group that want to promote democratic values, we see the concern with some common clauses in our contracts. we dont believe in dark money, tenet media style operations and dont enforce these clauses, and will be removing them going forward"
that took me approximately 30 seconds to think of and was much easier than having reputable journos like Burbank spread outright lies, have creators release dozens of identical CYA statements, and generally respond in a very MAGA "attack the reporter and outlet but not the claims" way
100% this. The best response was such low hanging fruit it's disgusting to me that's not what they went with. Even if they didn't mean it, it's the obvious "best" response.