A favorite refrain of media observers is to extol the Internet's ability to democratize information delivery.
The idea is that do-it-yourself information sites on the Web, such as blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia, will break the arbitrary power of the "media elite" to decide what qualifies as news. It is argued that these sites have the virtue of eliminating the filter of potentially politicized and corporately beholden media gatekeepers.
However, the task of separating the new and important from the ...