Very true. I've done layouts for newspapers before and I've noticed a few things:
1) White space looks wonderful, but for some reason we lend more 'serious creedance' to text that is small and crammed together.
2) Design is good to a point, but then drops off when it begins to feel 'commercial' I think after a hundred years of reading sloppily put together papers chalk full of the latest news, we sort of associate bad design with its 'genuineness' and overly clean design with something desceptive.
In the late 1980s there was a nice study that was produced with the advent of the then nwe-fangled laser printers. It showed that journalists were less likely to read a press release if produced in a neat, attractive sans-serif font, and more likely to read it for news content if produced in slightly distressed Courier.
I kind of get that feel too, and I think it might be related to the fact that many spammy/scraper news sites and amateur operations use designs off of themeforest or popular free WP themes, which tend to be fairly minimalist and white space heavy. Whereas pretty much all high end news outlets have extremely busy designs, and we have been conditioned to associate that with trustworthiness.
It is very strange how that works in our minds. You associate sites and immediately discriminate against the content because they look or 'feel' like other sites with less substantial content. For eg. the padding in Google+ gives me a feeling of amateur content (which it is). Same with sans-serif fonts - I got huge push-back at Techcrunch when I wanted to change the default reading font to a serif font, the feedback internally was that the site feels 'too serious'
The business of sites like NYTimes and WSJ make them feel 'authentic' for some reason. I have known this for a long time but couldn't really put my finger on what it was. I remember one of the first client websites I did back in 97 - we laid out absolutely everything that we needed on the page, but there was a lot of space, the client said that the site doesn't feel 'authentic' and I spent a lot of time simply thinking of things to throw onto the page to make it look busier.
I think this is something that a lot of developers and web designers know about, but for some reason I can't recall ever reading anything about it. If anybody knows if this phenomenon has a name or has any more information about it, please share. I have been reading a lot of design books this year and none have made mention of the link between a site being 'busy' and feeling professional
