Yes, artfully selected and carefully edited by people with a big axe to grind. Actually, there's nothing wrong with it, the public library is no different, but what spouts out of your monitor and printer comes out with this air of legitimacy because you found it yourself!!! Most of the net is people quoting each other, they're doing each other's laundry and selling each other pizza. It's amateur rabble rousers doing amateur publishing but it looks oh so slick, especially if they speak our language and share our prejudices.

I agree it can be a powerful data verification and tracking tool as you point out, but it also creates a community of the like-minded who reinforce each other and collectively ignore the fact that there is a whole other side that says something totally different. In fact, there's an infinity of other sides all saying slightly different things, and you think you can sort it out? If it was that easy we'd all do it and we'd all agree with you. Since we don't, we're right back where we started, aren't we? Oh I forgot, those who don't agree with you are so simple minded they don't realize they're being lied to. Why should I believe anything someone so patronizing has to say about anything?

Just an example. Think of any controversial event, say the Kennedy assasination. Just consider alll the books and articles written about it over the last 40+ years, ranging from sober scholarly assessments to complete wacko conspiratorial stuff. Now put them all in one library, and go in there and try to make sense of it all. Read them all, check how they cross reference and quote each other, propagate rumours and deliberate falsehoods, a huge mass of contradictory information based on a very few agreed-upon base facts. There are perfectly reasoned and supported lines of evidence that support Kennedy was killed by the Right, the Left, the Mafia, the Cubans, the Russians, and probably space aliens too. Which one do you believe? Is it ever possible to know?
Will the historians of the future get it right? Historians claim they have the perspective of history, but I bet the people who were there that day don't know either. That's the key lesson to learn about history, it is all guesswork, and I find it difficult to take seriously anyone who thinks it isn't.

What makes the mainstream media so valuable, even if they're full of crap, or influenced by government or big business, or hippy dippy liberal elites, what makes them superior to the small private source is that the MSM is public. It is the unrehearsed soundtrack of this incredible movie we call history. It goes on record, it is shared, it opens itself to contradiction, it is archived, and it competes with others like itself for the public trust. It is read by everyone, and if it is outed everyone knows it and the purveyors of the lie are discredited. That's what you don't get on the net.

Remember in Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith's job was editing the old news to bring it up to date with the latest party line. This was a fact of life in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and everyone knew it. People aren't dumb, they can tell when the news is being changed to meet the current political requirements, people have memories and they can tell what is happening now and what happened yesterday. This is why a free press always has the advantage; not that it doesn't make mistakes or can't be controlled or fooled, but that it can't keep it up for long. Sooner or later, an attempt to rewrite history is noticeable, it can't be hidden: it must exist in the scrutiny of the public. Once you reject that public character of the free press, and once you start propagating the alternatives, you have inherited Winston Smith's old job.