I come to news sites to read articles, not watch videos. If I wanted to watch videos I would go to YouTube. It’s as simple as that.
Making them autoplay is just adding insult to injury (as well as wasting bandwidth for literally no reason).
Let’s do some napkin maths while we think how much energy has been wasted by autoplaying a video for every visitor.
If I were to guess, the video player pre-caches a few seconds of content, maybe up to 10. That’s a fair few MB worth of reasonable quality video/audio data. Now multiply that for every single visitor. That’s a lot of wasted energy. The page itself is likely ~1MB in size (at least you’d hope), so they’re potentially increasing their costs by an order of magnitude by having the videos autoplay.