As much as we dKossacks deride the MSM, often rightfully so, we should step back and connect some dots, including: Dan Rather's forced resignation, the recent Newsweek apology, the renewed attempts to cut back NPR's news reporting. Whatever their suspect merits, these events are a setback for journalism; at the same time, the rightwing media has suffered no such setbacks, which shows that the right is continuing to win the media war. We cheer when a long-ignored story makes it into the MSM: they cheer when they've driven an anchor or network or news magazine into almost total submission.
My point: We need to assess our role in criticizing the MSM (yes, I know some folks hate this acronym, but this is where I'm heading: we do so at our own peril) and ask ourselves whether we are not unwittingly assisting the right's efforts to take apart what remains of respectable news organizations.
As someone whose politics falls on the far left, I've had a similar realization about liberalism, and that is that the left has long been doing the same thing as the right (though from a different perspective and for different reasons):
attacking liberalism. Attacked by the right and the left, liberalism has suffered greatly. Attacked by wingnuts and progressive bloggers, the same may be happening to the MSM.
As important as blogs are to us, they reach a very narrow section of society: we need to support those very same mainstream media we so often attack. And as much as I've come to hate the NYTimes, for instance, the world would be a darker place without it.