something to look out for

quick thought: I've been noticing a rising linguistic trend in televised news. While introducing a story, the speaker will say something like: "this has been circling around the internet," or "with rumors catching on throughout the interent today... ."
In any event, the news stories increasingly refer to internet information sources and politico blogs.
Initially, I assumed this new nod to the internet news hounds was an attempt for the tv newsfolks to sound hip: 'hey, we read blogs too.'
But I'm starting to think something else might be at work here. Feeling threatened by the instant access and anyone-can-publish nature of the web, perhaps the old-school network news folks are trying to discredit the web with little innuendos at the beginning of stories.
Recently, during the flap with the form letters coming home to various op-ed pages, ABC news began its story with something like this: 'the interent was abuzz today with stories of fake letters coming home from soldiers in Iraq. The letters all contain the same language, and purport to come from a soldier in Kirkuk. On the Internet, rumors abounded that the White House was behind a propaganda plot. However, our reporter has the real story.'
Regardless of the merits of this case (ie- whether or not, empirically, the web contained more stories than not imputing that bush was behind these letter (I don't remember that being the case)) the implication in the intro is clear. The net is not a trustworthy news source...you'd better tune in nightly to ABC World News Tonight in order to get the real story.
Very interesting. And if this is the broadcasters putting up a backdoor fight against online information gathering, I'm interested to see how things go. As I'll say over and over, if the object is comprehensive and accurate news, the broadcasters fight a losing battle. While they simplify stories to the lowest denominator and make their news as close to entertainment as possible in order to reign in the tv crowd, the online news surfer has already seen the story in various complexities. Because of the plurality of the net, and the lack of presumed authority- the reader takes an active role in newsgathering. We are all reporters and publishers. Thus, we check the story for accuracy, and find how it stands on every side of the debate. No news channel can provide an active role for the viewer.