To be fair to the beat writers on the access thing, how many blog posts rely on the work of beat writers? The NBC blog, for example, is mostly commenting on stories written by journalists. The Gleeman & the Geek podcasts use information from beat writers' work quite a bit. A lot of what is written here comes from information gathered by the beat writers. So from their perspective, I can see where it would get frustrating when people denigrate their work and praise the work that bloggers can do thanks to their lack of access.
On the other hand, Mackey invited this on himself, and he was pretty hypocritical with the whole thing.