Well, it may not be a surprise that a retired CBS reporter doesn't think so but I don't think he's wrong or actually right either. As it happens I'm currently reading Dan Gillmor's We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (which is available for free; if you don't want to install Adobe Acrobat then just put the URLs into Google and it will translate them into HTML). Gillmor by contrast is almost shrilly positive about blogging being a paradigm shift and would be more convincing if the book wasn't so superficial, though to be fair I'm only a third through it. Still, he approvingly drags in McLuhan and Alvin Toffler which shows that he's one of those working journalists focused on finding and sorting facts, not in actually thinking about them or pretty much anything come to that.
What these guys and most of the other discussion (see for instance the SF Chronicle, Business Week, ZDNet or Boston Herald) has been about is hard news. And in that arena, bloggers for the most part aren't journalists, at least not in any meaningful sense. They aren't the ones talking to politicians, attending trials, uncovering corporate malfeasance, finding out where the literal bodies are buried and such; y'know the hard and often inexplicably romanticized grind of day to day journalism. These types of bloggers are generally commentators and sifters which isn't usually the same thing. Major "serious" journalism can be done in such a manner--I.F. Stone is a classic example--but if remarks aren't literature, they also aren't journalism.
Then again this is "journalism" in a strict sense. It's telling that both Gillmor and the CBS reporter (Eric Engberg, but I didn't name him earlier and it's stylistically clumsy to do so now) make distinctions between experts and the rest of humanity. Engberg does so as a barrier (even if he's right that exit polls require a lot of experience and training to interpret properly) and Gillmor simply because his worldview is so firmly based on experts vs. "laypeople" that he can't rethink that even when doing so is the entire point of his book.
So news bloggers aren't digging up the data and doing the interviews but maybe they have a more important function as synthesists (like one of the characters out of Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar), trawlers, hunters, webweavers and gadflies. Sure, some of them are careerists, idiots and worse but does anybody honestly think this should be left to CBS or the NYT? I recently read that Tokyo has three English-language daily newspapers, more than most American cities including the one where I live. News blogging is the most promising path to date out of media consolidation and corporate control and despite some obvious dangers can only be beneficial.
(I was planning to add more about how these journalism/blogging discussions only focus on a small portion of blogs and how cultural blogs are much more clearly making real changes, even in journalism of a different type. But that's for another day.)