Well, I trust independent media less, because the "reporters" by and large, aren't even journalists, which atleast attempt to adhere to some ethics. The bloggers are outright propagandists, just watch what happens anytime Microsoft is mentioned on Slashdot, even if the story was a joke or mistake, the "editors" don't retract anything, and often, don't even LOOK for any outside comment.
Independent media is the rumor mill. A few academics will release a paper or a professor will write an essay. It gets editorialized on a few sites. That gets cited by others. And sooner or later, it gets blogged and linked to, and has filtered its way all over the indy media as fact.
Example: The EU dollar conspiracy behind the war. You can track this back to a paper put out by a marxist Indian think-tank, Rupe-India, that claims the real reason behind the war is because Iraq was going to switch to EU dollars, and that this would cascade and cause the destruction of the US economy.
Despite the nonsense economics described in this paper, it was published on many prominent "indy" media sites, regurgitated by "editors", citing the original paper. Then, on other "indy" media sites, the opinion papers cited other opinions on sister sites. All of them citing each other as confirming sources, but all essentially quoting the one paper.
Not ONE of these so-called "editors" even bothered to do any fact checking, asked no economics departments at any universities to comment, talked to no independent experts, and got no opposition commentary.
Yes, 60 Minutes, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, et al, are BIASED. However, they still make some attempt at fact checking, and they still attempt -- even if they sabotage it with bad editing -- to get opposition commentary.
I don't get that on indy media sites. What I get on indy media sites is regurgitated rumors, accusations, and essays from other sites.
Many independent media sites do not even have any field correspondents, especially the blogbased ones.
They are personal opinion masquerading as news.
