And a blogger is limited to his own personal knowledge and experience. FR has thousands of very informed persons, and you can take almost any subject and you will have FR posters who have personal and/or expert knowledge of the subject. And differences of opinion and variances of facts are tried in a very public court on the threads. That is where FR is vastly superior to the blogs and the MSM.
I lost my respect for CNN during the invasion of Iraq, when Eason Jordan EVP and Chief News Executive of CNN, wrote an OpEd piece in (as I recall) the NY Times, defending CNN's news coverage from Iraq over the years.
In that article, he admitted that CNN routinely withheld information and flattered Saddam (I don't think he mentioned it in the article, but CNN's puff piece on his birthday party was one egregious example) in order to protect its access to Iraq. CNN even went so far as to withhold information that could have saved the lives of Saddam's sons-in-law who returned to Iraq from Jordan and were killed by him. If even refused to report on threats and torture of its own people.
What was the point of maintaining this access, if the access wasn't used to report the news?
The punchline of the story is that the Times apparently didn't find anything objectionable in Jordan's news decisions. I have not watched CNN for years, so I can't comment about its current coverage. I do know that the NY Times has gone beyond all boundries of common decency, and has utterly failed to uphold the first principle, that news belongs in the news pages and opinion belongs in the opinion pages and news-analysis pieces.
The NY Times used to be my secular bible. Today, I don't even buy it at airports, even for the crossword puzzle.
Excellent post. Don't you just love it?!