A news article in the New York Times business section about Disney and ESPN reports, "Estimates vary widely, but if ESPN offered its cable channels à la carte, it would most likely have to charge an astonishingly high fee for the streaming service, perhaps $40 or $50 per month, just to maintain its current revenue."
Maybe just tell Times readers the price rather than characterizing it as "high" or "astonishingly high"? The New York Times charges an astonishingly high $86.67 a month for a seven-day-a-week home delivery subscription of its newspaper, which probably provides less entertainment, and more aggravation, than does access to ESPN.
The Times used to employ skilled editors who kept a close rein on this sort of subjective, opinionated characterization seeping into straight news articles. Maybe those editors are on summer vacation. Or maybe those editors are gone for good, Times ownership having decided that the cost of employing them was so astonishingly high that the improvement in quality and credibility wasn't worth spending the money that would otherwise be available to pay out in astonishingly high compensation to members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family.