There's a reason for this and it isn't SEO. SEO is still important, but it stopped being the main show about three years ago when Google altered their algorithms.
What happens right now is each site has a PageRank which is kind of like a popularity meter for your website. Basically, the more established your site is and the more hits it has, the higher the page rank and the higher it will be in the search results. Any MSM news site will have more than double the pagerank of a "conspiracy" website due to just the amount of traffic they are pushing.
To see what I'm talking about go to
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php and type in a MSM news site and then type in the conspiracy sites. See how much higher the pagerank is for the MSM sites and you will understand why they always rank highest.
--sjkted