The greatest part of FR is, when you spend some time and learn the "players", you discover who really knows what they are talking about. The need to discover that, of course, is the downfall, too - so many seek to opine on items that they don't have much basis, and that can lead to difficulty for newbies, including, I suppose, the Old Media who are trying to figure FR out. We have a great wealth of experience and knowledge in almost any field, collectively, and in almost all stories, it becomes obvious who has the real insight - but that process is not very straightforward, so someone watching briefly how it is done is easily misled.
In addition, and in many stories even more important, is the collective memory we have represented here --- almost every topic has some super-involved folks from the past: Clinton scandals == Alamo Girl and her many assistants, for example, but that is not the only one. I daresay if you brought up nearly any story history from OJ, to Nick Berg, to Iraq War(s), to JFK.jr death, to cosmology, ..., etc., you would quickly find FReepers who were deeply involved in that story. But that's not the only thing: we have a collective college education as well as life experience education that no newsroom in the country is able to afford and call on as rapidly as we have it at our fingertips. And, now that it seems none of them care to even try to do research any more, on such simple topics that are dealt with in easy historical documents or common sense (the proportional fonts of the CBS FRAUDcast comes immediately to mind), they are at a real disadvantage.
In addition, none of the real movers here have any trouble doing honest and real research on the 'net (and many have their own personal resources complimenting that)... and most of the Old Mediots seem to have no ability there.