There is some truth to your statement, but there are a number of sites dedicated to scholarly works or reference data. Google scholar is a good starting point for many things, findlaw provides access to court decisions and interpretations, and any number of sites are dedicated to journals and scholarly publications (even in the field of science).
Now if you're getting to all of your news sources through fark or
/. --- yeah, you're out of luck.
Point being; if you know where to look there are tons of valuable educational and reference resources to be found on the net (didn't
/. do a review on an online set of courses not long ago). I've been listening to this series as of late:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978371 , though I hear that Harvard has a good set of podcasts available as well.