Amateur-run blogs are far more honest than reporting, in my experience. The sympathetic phrasing would be that bloggers haven't had all but the last shreds of their integrity worn away by an editor demanding 6 column inches by deadline, over and over again. The unsympathetic phrasing would be that bloggers are not professional liars and might naively fear getting caught. Either way, I trust non-professional blogs over Wired News any day. Blog coverage is often honest and accurate. Reporting, when I or anyone I know or any subject I know about in detail is being reported on, almost never is.
Depends on the blogger. There are plenty of amateur hacks, particularly when you get into an echo chamber based on politics, conspiracy theories, religion, etc.
But there are a ton of subject matter experts (like John Baez) out there blogging on objective stuff, and their average quality is often amazing.
We're not even talking about John Baez here, just blogs randomly selected from the set of blogs on the Internet that I actually run across, which is admittedly a biased sample. The thought that any mainstream media could possibly, possibly be as trustworthy as a John Baez blog post is a thought worthy only of derisive laughter.
