The Wall Street Journal refers to the DJIA more often than the S&P 500, and they have a reasonable business section. They mostly do it because they're tied up with it, though.
No great loss to them, TFA notes that they're well correlated (and gossip about GE sells papers on slow news days.)
Actually, if you could measure it globally, most institutional investors who measure/benchmark to the US stock market probably use the Russell 1000. You're point is still valid tough regarding cap weighted vs. price weighted.
The Dow Jones index is used only by the popular non-financial press.