“Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable ‘news’ and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king’s twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of ‘news’ failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien regime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.”
Although Greider is talking about establishment media, he could be referring to any number of bloggers who like to fly a little too close to the corporate drip-feed.