Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended a busy week on the East Coast on a much lighter note than it started.

At an event in New York City Friday celebrating the launch of Facebook's News Tab, Zuckerberg struck a jovial tone with reporters and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, a former critic of the company who interviewed him on stage. The upbeat event followed a six-hour hearing on Wednesday in front of the House Financial Services Committee, where Zuckerberg was interrogated over Facebook's new cryptocurrency libra project and berated for his lack of answers to civil rights questions about his platform. A day earlier, a state-led antitrust probe of Facebook announced that attorneys general from 47 U.S. states and territories are now part of the investigation.

Forging a new alliance with the news media industry is a savvy distraction from Facebook's many challenges in Washington. The company has failed to gain back the same confidence in its business from lawmakers as it has from investors after a series of privacy scandals unfurled last year. (Its stock is up 43% in 2019.) Facebook currently faces as many as four antitrust probes: from the state AGs, the Federal Trade Commission and the House Judiciary Committee. The Justice Department is also looking into the company, according to Reuters, which Facebook and the DOJ have not directly confirmed.

The News Tab initiative marks a huge shift in Facebook's approach to the media industry, which has long lamented the decline in advertising revenue through the tech revolution that has ultimately shuttered many publications. With the launch of the News Tab, Facebook will now pay publications for their content through multi-year commitments. About 200 of publishers, including News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal and CNBC parent company NBCUniversal, have already signed on. An independent team of journalists will curate the stories that appear in the feature, according to Facebook.

Some may wonder why Facebook would now choose to start paying for content that is already being posted to its service for free. Facebook has absorbed years of scolding from the media industry for its role in driving profit away from their own websites and allegedly inflating video metrics that had helped reshape the industry.

Facebook likely has reasons beyond its business model for launching the News Tab. Zuckerberg has made free speech, and perhaps by extension, free press, a cornerstone of his philosophy. In a speech at Georgetown University last week, Zuckerberg defended his controversial decision to refrain from fact checking ads by politicians and said he believes keeping political advertising on Facebook is important even though, "From a business perspective the controversy is not worth the very small part of the business that they make up."

But it's also impossible to separate Facebook's new direction on news content from the intense scrutiny the company is receiving from both D.C. officials and the press. Facebook declined to comment, but pointed to Zuckerberg's recent statements and writings on the News Tab and journalism in general.

Here are some of the reasons Facebook's launch could prove to be a savvy move.