The best phrase, "the mainstream media suffers from gross ignorance..." sums up journalism.
Journalism majors and MSM "professionals" seems completely devoid of any knowledge of history, logic, military history or tactics. Listening to them opine on anything is grating because their ignorance is almost unbounded. Three year olds know more about Mayan architecture than journalists do about anything.
The blogosphere can beat the MSM at fact checking and rapid debunking of bogus info. No matter how arcane the subject, there is a blogger somewhere who is a subject matter expert.