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Graneros: There you have it. Because the MSM and the Dems in are full attack mode against the Tea Party it can only mean the Tea Party is successful beyond anything anyone thought possible and that the Dems are very scared of them. Reading the news in the new bizzaro world of the USA means whatever they say you can count on the opposite being true.

That isn't anything new. It traces back to the post-Civil War era which is also the founding era of wire service journalism.

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
points out that the Associated Press was challenged for blatantly accruing centralized propaganda power. The Associated Press's response was to point out that the newspapers which made up the membership of the AP were (at that time, and traditionally) notorious for not agreeing on much of anything. So the AP itself was objective. We see how that worked out; now the news outlets, broadcast as well as print, are notorious for agreeing about everything.
This, IMHO, is the logical consequence of the need of the news organizations for national and international news which only the wire services could provide, and the lack of which dooms a news organization to the ghetto of strictly local reporting. That suppressed openly opinionated/partisan journalism, but it empowered the inherent tendency of journalists to promote their own importance, now no longer checked by competition among journalism outlets. All report the same stuff, from the same sources, according to the same criteria - so the individuality among them is expressed only in distinctions not actual differences.
The criteria - "Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man," "If it bleeds, it leads," and "Always make your deadline" - are obviously designed to interest the public (for profit), and have nothing to do with the public interest (informing people on matters of importance). The lack of competition among journalists has led to a lack of introspection within journalism - the only concern among journalists is for the conformity which they confuse with objectivity. Journalists make no effort to be objective in fact. Any actual attempt at objectivity would be incompatible with claiming - or even associating with those who claim for them - that they actually are objective.
Compare with the similar conundrum recognized by the ancient Greeks - any attempt at actual wisdom must start by limiting one's self to claiming to love wisdom (see, philosopher) rather than claiming to actually be wise (see, sophist, origin of our term for slippery argumentation, sophistry).
Journalists "don't plant 'taters, they don't plant cotton" - but let the crop or either fail, and they can always make a buck complaining about the failures of others. Second guessing is cheap talk, and that is the specialty of journalism. And the extreme of cheap talk is socialism. It is no accident that Lenin was a writer and Mussolini was a reporter/editor - the idea that critics rather than doers should run things is naturally congenial to writers.

So journalists and writers are naturally attracted to socialism, which puts critics in charge. And what, therefore, could be more natural than for ambitious politicians to attach themselves to the natural propensity and predilection of journalism, and thereby to avail themselves of the propaganda wind that places at their backs?
In short, nothing could be more natural than that politicians should align themselves with journalism, and that journalism should reciprocate by assigning positive labels to their political allies. The result we observe is that there is no example of a virtue ("moderation" a.k.a. "centrism" being a classical virtue, and "progress" and "liberty" being American virtues) which has not been used as a label for the allies of journalism. Reciprocally, opposition to socialism gets labeled "conservative" (opposite to the American virtue of a belief in progress), "extreme," or "right wing."
In reality "liberals" do not promote liberty, "progressives" do not promote progress by the people (but only by an encroaching central government), and "moderates" are merely soft-spoken allies of the above rather than holding positions not simpatico to journalism. In reality "objective" journalists, like their "liberal/progressive/moderate" allies, are systematic perpetrators of sophistry. Which explains why we have so much work to do deconstructing the endemic distortions we find in "objective news."
Journalism and Objectivity

U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernández ruled that “investigative blogger” Crystal L. Cox “was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.”

Having the government give the MSM special priviledges is something the MSM has pushed for decades. They were all for the first amendment as long as they had a lock on the media. Now that they have some competition, not so much.

Can we examine the nomenclature "main stream media" (MSM) a bit critically, please?

A television channel or a magazine or newspaper or radio station is a medium. Article 1 Section 8 the Constitution provides explicit congressional authority
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
The invention of high speed printing presses, the telegraph, phonographs, radio, movies, TV, the Internet, and so forth are all therefore condoned by the Constitution. Such "media" are in principle content neutral. We should have no argument against "media" of communication, as such, so railing against "the media" is really basically stupid. Therefore protection of "the freedom of . . . the press" should be understood as covering all media of communication.

To suggest that fiction be censored, other than that parents should control content to which their children are exposed, is anathema. If lefties make good fiction writers, we will just have to live with that. So that leaves nonfiction. And again, nonfiction books don't have to be right in every particular to have some or even a lot of wisdom in them. So censoring nonfiction books is also a nonstarter, constitutionally and practically.
Any legitimate brief must therefore be directed at topical nonfiction - i.e., journalism.

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, newspapers were notoriously fractiously independent, and were more like modern opinion journals than like modern newspapers. Something changed the newspapers into the homogenous "press" of today. IMHO the reason for that change is bound and gagged, and lying on our doorstep - the reason is the telegraph. The telegraph, and The Associated Press. The AP has its roots smack in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and by the Twentieth Century it was in full flower. Meaning, that by then the economic incentives of the use of the AP had by then driven the "fractious independence" of the various newspapers into the ghetto known as the editorial page.

The AP based its claim to objectivity on the fact that its members notoriously did not agree on much of anything - but over the course of a generation or two wire service journalism destroyed that fractiousness almost completely. What remains is the overarching self interest of journalists. The standard rules of journalism which are promoted as "objectivity" are transparently designed not for objectivity but for selling newspapers. "If it bleeds, it leads." "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man.'" "Always make your deadline." These things have nothing to do with objectivity and everything to do with protecting the journalist's job by selling newspapers. If you think about it, subjectivity - the natural tendency of anyone to see things from a self-interested point of view - is only to be expected. And while it is possible to attempt objectivity, it is not possible to know that you are being objective.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Notice, dear reader, not only how apt the above Adam Smith quote is to the point, but how quoting it changes the discussion from "objectivity" to wisdom. And I contend that a journalist's claim "objectivity" cannot be distinguished logically from a claim of wisdom. I would welcome a serious discussion of that point from anyone who discerns a true logical distinction. Absent any serious debate on that point, this has a very significant implication. Because a claim of superior wisdom is precisely the origin of the term, "sophistry." So when the wire service journalist claims that journalism is objective, he is engaging in sophistry. Another way of reaching the same conclusion is to note that the first action of one who is seriously attempting to be objective is to try to discern, and openly declare, any reasons why he might not be objective - and that such self-abnegation is precisely what the journalist who is claiming to be objective is not doing. Thus, we see that your "objective" wire service journalist is not even trying to be objective.

As I noted earlier, the AP based its claim to objectivity on the fact that its members notoriously did not agree on much of anything - but over the course of a generation or two wire service journalism destroyed that fractiousness almost completely. What remains is the overarching self interest of journalists. The self interest of journalists is to make journalism profitable. Profitable, and influential. Journalists "want to make a difference." Journalists can influence politicians, journalists can influence government. Thus, the bigger government is, the more influence journalism has. Journalists tell you who goes along and gets along with journalists by awarding such people positive labels, and tarring their opponents with negative labels.
Dear Reader, the Constitution is a progressive, liberal document. One of the (relatively few) enumerated powers of Congress is justified on the basis that it was expected "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." And the mission of the Constitution. summarized in last objective listed in its preamble, is to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." So America was founded as a progressive, liberal nation. A progressive, liberal nation is not a conservative nation. Indeed, I recall a quotation in a history book I read (in the dim past) in school, in which a Briton criticized the Constitution and the government it created as "all sheet and no anchor." Yet the very people who want to preserve liberty and the opportunity for progress which liberty provides get labelled "conservative" - and the very people who would restrict oil drilling, coal mining, genetic engineering of crops, etc. are called "liberal" or "progressive." "Moderation" is a classical virtue, which the immodest people who claim to be objective use as a label for people most like themselves, who want the scope and size of government to be anything but moderate. They always want more.
The only positive label which journalists apply in politics but do not give their friends is the one they reserve soley for themselves - "objective." Unless of course one of their "liberal" friends (George Stephanopolis, poster boy) changes hats and gets a job as a journalist colleague. Then, without any change of attitude on his part, he instantaneously becomes "objective."

The conclusion of the matter is that the government should not define "journalists" at all, but its working definition is that which journalism itself adheres to - that a journalist never questions the objectivity of any other journalist. Any law which gives special treatment to journalism's "borg" sets them apart from the people, and illegitimately establishes them as a sort of priesthood, in contravention rather than in furtherance of the intent of the First Amendment.