'Unpaid home hobbyist writers' don't have more credibility than newsrooms, with budgets, copy editors, massive networks of sources, researchers, professional staff support - which costs money.
I thought the 00s proved that embarassingly that they did, as five minutes of fact checking with a search engine proved they had gotten Middle School level facts deeply wrong.
This is a little bit sarcasm, fine but there news is professional business.
Random bloggers generally don't have credibility, they can in some instances check facts and even break big stories and so so in a very credible way, however, there's little incentive and they have no power, because they don't make money and mostly don't have an audience. More importantly, nobody cares about them. If they want to speak to 'The Minister of Defence' about an important event, the Minister will not respond. When the BBC/CBC/CNN needs that interview, the Minister will likely, if there's something on the agenda.
Because they don't have credibility, sources won't trust them which is the most major source of difficult-to-get-at information.
Wikileaks and other teams had to build credibility.
And of course the fact that news rooms cover a massive array of subjects.
Resigning the entirety of news to 'some checks on Google' is glib.
