I'm going to hazard a guess, that because ancient browsers sometimes displayed html tags they didn't understand, the author has deployed a hack to ensure the correct character encoding is used on a new browsers without soiling the rendering on older systems.

Also, I was hoping that 68k.news supported HTTP 1.0, but it doesn't, it's a virtual host on the IP, so needs the host: header variable set, which is HTTP 1.1 - that's a bit of a shame as it means the original browsers such as Mosaic can't access it.