BTC News has spoken about the value of blogs but a discussion over in Gadflyer is of some interest. An opinion piece by Dana Milibank, who provides consistently informative pieces, entitled My Bias for Mainstream News was linked. In part:
Partisans on the left and right have formed cottage industries devoted to discrediting what they dismissively call the "mainstream media" -- the networks, daily newspapers and newsmagazines. Their goal: to steer readers and viewers toward ideologically driven outlets that will confirm their own views and protect them from disagreeable facts. ...
It's fine to argue about the merits of the Iraq war, but these views are just plain wrong. Duelfer did not find weapons or active programs to make them; the 9/11 commission found no "collaborative relationship" between al Qaeda and Iraq. ...
Organizations such as Bozell's Media Research Center, David Brock's Media Matters, and scores of partisan outlets on both sides that back them up, are devoted almost entirely to attacking the press. Those on the right are so practiced at citing liberal media bias that they've assigned it an abbreviation: LMB. Left-wingers, meanwhile, complain about a timid, corporate media that helped Bush get reelected and led the nation to war in Iraq.
The essay would have been more convincing if it did a better job answering the critics. After all, the media's record on the whole WMDs issue and other "necessary" reasons to go to war was a tad bit mixed, including Priest's own paper. The cynicism of some, including some blogs that provided alternative views in a consistent fashion (not piecemeal and therefore of questionable value) was grounded in reality.
There always was advocacy journalism; in fact, early newspapers had a clear point of view. And, these news sources at times had a questionable handling of the facts. Nonetheless, some of them had a better handle in some cases than the mainstream press. Who was more informative in the long run in the antebellum period on the subject of race relations and such? The Liberator or regular weeklies?
The same might be said today on certain subjects, unless a person can truly say with a straight face that many papers actually provide a well-rounded look on certain issues. Since a third of the news coverage before the war did not concern anti-war groups, this is debatable. The same applies to many other subjects that rarely receive extended analysis, surely not on a consistent basis.
Many of so-called mainstream news sources had (and in some sense, continue to have) misleading comments that Priest somewhat misleadingly implies is the bailiwick of conservative news outlets. I'm not just talking about WMDs. And, media watch groups are right to point this out. Also, see the book The Frame Game for how a particular point of view can cloud reality, even if each and every fact is on the whole correct individually. For instance, mainstream coverage of the latest bit of hypocrisy coming out of Washington leave out or fail to highlight many important wrinkles that blogs and other sources focus upon.
The country is greatly divided in many ways and it is infecting how we view the news. Nonetheless, more sources of news is not necessarily a bad thing per se, and it's not like everyone read mainstream neutral reporting back in the day. Also, I too think those who I relatively agree with sometimes tend to exaggerate. The mainstream (not a bad word, really) press has a lot to offer, as shown by the amount of times blogs link to them. And, part of the problem is the failure of the Democrats like Gore to play the system properly. But, the system was played, and the press at times did not do a good time stopping it.
In the end, Dana Priest showed his bias, but did not quite do a great job defending it.