It's not a conspiracy. They stop after 1922 because of copyright law. Everything from 1922 and before is public domain, so can be reprinted without getting permission from the original author (i.e. the newspaper). Everything after, you have to pay the author, which is why post-1922 newspaper collections are behind paywalls.

If you want more recent newspapers, you might want to subscribe to newspapers.com. They have a ton of newspapers, mostly small town newspapers, but they have collections of a lot of larger ones now, too, like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

You might also want to check your local library, or local university. They often have subscriptions to services like EBSCO, Proquest, GenealogyBank, and others that contain collections of newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Most library systems in medium to large-sized cities in the U.S. should have access to one or more of those services, though you do have to go to the library to use it.

Beyond that, unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of more recent newspapers available freely. You can try Fulton History which has some more recent stuff, but the scans aren't very good and the search capability is pretty terrible. Also, Google has the entire run of Life magazine available online for free.