Future of political discourse?

What's interesting in this Reason story about the Food Safety Modernization Act is not the discussion about the act itself, but Doherty's ideas about whether this is a model of future political discussion, with the fall of the mainstream press. Read to the end where he makes these comments:

To put it another way, the H.R. 875 debate is a lively representation of what “journalism” in a post-newspaper age can do for “democracy.” Which is something far more important and detailed than just one writer with a million other things on his plate making a few calls and making a decision for you.(Meta-ironies noted.)

Certainly, it’s more convenient for a reader to think he’s read one 900-word piece in a respected source and therefore understands some public policy topic. The debate over H.R. 875 may well be an example of the rising dominant model of political reporting: contentious fighting among often careless, agenda-driven forces producing
all of the information that the truly interested would need to know what they need to know.

This is certainly an interesting observation, but as a life surfer it provides some cause for concern. Few of us have the time to read the whole text of bills like this, its the whole point of having a representative democracy, so there will certainly continue to be a demand for "trusted sources" to do our homework for us and provide the crib sheet. Of course, this doesn't mean that we should subsidize the press, who's to say that they are any more trusted than a well researched blog or website.