Aye. As a tactic it's just an old-fashioned misogynist smear that attempts to introduce a negative characterisation of a person or group into a discussion in order to discredit them and what they do.
One question to ask is why does someone need to discredit journalists or their reporting? Another is why should others need to be convinced that journalists are responsible for the 'bad news' they are reporting, despite them having no direct responsibility for either the bad news itself or its consequences?
In answer to the first question, journalists discredit themselves when they make stuff up, or fail to verify what they're reporting, or when they simply reproduce stuff other people have made up and present it as true. But that's not what seems to be going on here. While 'whorenalist' is a misogynistic characterisation of the person rather than their reporting, if a journalists is to be considered as having compromised certain standards or principles for personal gain then what are the standards or principles they have compromised? Here we get nothing on that and 'whorenalist' is assumed to be self-explanatory: journalists are compromised and discredited
because they are whores. And if they are automatically morally/ethically compromised as individuals then of course any 'bad news' they report can be automatically discredited t'boot - which addresses the second question.
Finally we should probably note that there seems to be no shortage of people who are willing to whore for free these days - and no shortage of venues from which they can ply their trade with both enthusiasm and alacrity.
