What I think he meant is that, most of the news website became slow and bad user experiences on mobile, pushing users to download wall-gardened native mobile news apps by established News Corporations to experience something fast and kind of pleasant. This is a problem for Google and for "freedom of speech", because you're not googling for news anymore, you go straight to your established news native application, preventing you to see other competing results (like blogs or smaller news websites for instance)

Pushing them to have cleaner and faster websites makes the user stay on the web. It is a clear benefit for Google, but to his point, to the user too. (At least that was the goal)