Thank you for that question. Again, that's a very important one.
No, we would never do that with any of the sources that we have relationships with. We are extremely careful in principle and protective of how we approach our ranking in Google Search or in Google News. That would preclude us from doing anything you noted there.
In fact, internally at Google, we have an honest results policy that doesn't even allow people like me to have a conversation with a publisher about how we rank their content individually. That would be contrary to the principles that we espouse and follow with Google Search and Google News.