Eh, I would say (sadly) that the mainstream news media practically depends on Wikipedia to fill in background info for half of their stories. Gaffes by TV reporters have occasionally been traced back to Wikipedia vandalism. Sometimes Wikipedians then cite the misguided journalist(s) when adding the falsehood into the article [1], a circular phenomenon of "fact-creation" that has been lampooned by xkcd [2].

[1] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/10/2211220/false-fact-o...

[2] http://xkcd.com/978/

That is cynical to the point of being shortsighted. Even assuming the "news oligarchy" really operates as something resembling a unified entity, and regardless of said unified entity's feelings vis a vis Wikipedia - an outage would make headlines.

I am not saying all editorial coverage would be uniformly supportive, but it would certainly be newsworthy.