A lot of people are using Facebook as their newsfeed, so I think it's not quite honest to claim that Facebook is not gaining anything from sharing news stories.
Facebook would be a lot less compelling without news.
People used to browse headlines on newspaper sites, then Facebook came and aggregated all the headlines, and "stole" all the visitors of the news sites.
Reporting on stories is a lot of effort (especially local stories where you can't just copy paste some press release), and Facebook wants to put the headlines on their website for free. Publishers should be happy about the exposure!
I understand that publishers are pissed. They are doing the work, but Facebook makes money from the content, and all they get in exchange is a small percentage of people who view a post actually click through to read the full story.