http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=18766
I don't subscribe to the Gallup database so I can't see the whole study, but the first paragraph reveals some of what you are looking for. I'm sure such a poll exists; we've just got to keep looking. I'm not as optimistic that most people feel as I do, but that doesn't mean that much to me.
I don't know that any individual blog is better than all of the mainstream media, but being able to rely on multiple internet news sources, or multiple news sources period, gives the public a better overall perspective than relying on the mainstream media, who tend to have a pack mentality about issues that often seems to be about telling the public what to think more than reporting on events. It's the attempt to shape the story into something edifying for the public or sensational for the public that I object to. On any page other than the opinion page, give me the information, qualify the limitations of your sources, let me decide what I think. I can decide for myself whether I think his being Muslim is part of the story or just an interesting demographic quirk for a guy in Utah.
You are reading WAY more into my posts than is actually present there if you thought that I didn't value freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It's not the freedom that the problem; it what the mainstream media has been doing or not doing with that freedom. For every Watergate, you've got hundreds of Anna Nicole or Britney stories.
How you got from criticism of media for NOT including information to historic cases in which the press revealed hidden information is beyond me. Would the reporting on Nixon have been nearly as important if Woodard and Bernstein decided for us what the public should know? On the other hand, in matter of national security, the MSM seems to think we need to know everything right then. It's hard to see the kind of serious minded moral and ethical discrimination that you are trying to make the case for. What professors of journalistic ethics are trying to teach, and what the actual media seem to be doing don't line up.
As much as you may be bummed that I said mean things about your friends, there's no way that you can claim the moral high road for the mainstream media as a collective today. You friends may be awesome and they may do the kind of important, objective and complete reporting that I'm looking for.
But that's not what we're getting from most sources. I think the heavy losses that newspapers are experiencing, as well as some rating loss with traditional big three network news shows, do reflect a serious problem. (And some of the problem may be the type of blogs people get their news from.)
And I do know professional journalists, for whatever that's worth to you.