A lot of fans are motivating the direction of journalism these days... particularly fans of PS4. If you are a journalist and you are not absolutley panning everything about the Xbox One, and not calling everything about Xbox One a "disaster", "weak", "underpowered" or some other extreme adjective they rant... and rant... and rant... and rant again in the comment sections of every article. This is especially the case I see at Eurogamer...
In this new age of social media and consumer feedback, analysts have to look at what's going on and try to decipher it. One thing that must be apparent is that if there's a number of people vocally dissing MS, there ought to also be a number of fans defending them. If the feedback is very one-way, the obvious interpretation is that former fans are no longer supporting the platform and are either staying silent or joining in the criticisms.
Bare in mind that the people who are posting are the same populace who make up last-gen gamers, which is numerically 50/50 XB360 and PS3 fans. One would expect the comments sections of various websites to reflect that balance if it hasn't changed.
As for journalism pandering to the masses, on the one hand I agree its unpleasant and it leads to misrepresentation, but on the other, that's the very basis of democracy! Give the people what they want. If the people want a villain, give them a villain. If you are running a media site and the comments section is full of people grumbling about company X and praising company Y, posting articles to the contrary won't go down well with the people reading your site (as expressed by those who care to comment, anyhow), so it's no wonder the comment sections tend to match the editorial and
vice versa. It's the same with newspapers - people buy the newspaper that slants reality towards their personal, preferred interpretation. With news and information being a commercial-sector business and not a benevolent state education service, we can't expect anything else. The motivation is to make money; not inform people and cultivate balanced, patient thinking.
Given that, I can't see how the comments sections and fora can be considered unrepresentative of the views of those demographics. I would expect there to be a contingent defending MS equal in proportion to those who support MS and their policies. Of course, MS and other companies are free to ignore one demographic to go after others, and MS could ignore the gamer noise. But the noise from the interwebs and those gamer types should paint a reasonable picture of how that demographic will respond, by and large, to the product. It's similar to a poll of random people (self selecting as those who are willing to express an opinion) giving feedback on what they like and don't like.