While everyone can post a response, you still have to do it in a way that gets an audience.The mainstream media still has an audience advantage. What blogs do is make it harder for them to avoid a point of view. Blogs are the letters to the editor that the mainstream media does not want to print. If they capture enough audience, such as in the bogus TANG documents used by CBS, they have an impact.

On occasion, blogger coverage of events annoys the mainstream media that they lash out as in the recent case of the Washington Post story on Bill Roggio's reporting in western Anbar. With that story the Post probably unintentionally increased Roggio's site visits.