It's difficult (for values that soon reduce to impossible) to get press accreditation as an independent journalist.
There are plenty of scrappy little online micronewspapers now, usually with an evident political slant, and some of them do real investigative journalism.
But there's no chance they'll get the direct access to the political system their mainstream cousins do.
It's also incredibly easy to astroturf fake news at that level, so not all of those sites are reliable.
The point about the MSM is that they're mass media with a huge subscriber/reader base. That's what gives them their leverage.
There are plenty of scrappy little online micronewspapers now, usually with an evident political slant, and some of them do real investigative journalism.
But there's no chance they'll get the direct access to the political system their mainstream cousins do.
It's also incredibly easy to astroturf fake news at that level, so not all of those sites are reliable.
The point about the MSM is that they're mass media with a huge subscriber/reader base. That's what gives them their leverage.
Journalism is much less influential without that.