Nick Coleman works for a newspaper called the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A number of times over the past months, the boys over at the Minneapolis-based PowerLine blog have taken Coleman to task for poorly-constructed arguments. And, it seems whenever they have, Coleman has responded with ad-hominem attacks against his critics.

Poor Coleman must be getting a little jealous of the coverage that PowerLine has been getting recently. The blog is widely credited with breaking the Dan Rather forged documents story. And Time Magazine even named PowerLine as “Blog of the Year” in its “Person of the Year” issue.

Coleman’s most recent article reads more like the LiveJournal posting of a bitter teen complaining about the fawning praise bestowed upon his school’s star quarterback: “bloggers are so hip and cool they can make fun of the poor and the disadvantaged while working out of paneled bank offices.”

Really? And just what are these examples of PowerLine “mak[ing] fun of the poor and the disadvantaged”? Of course, Coleman cites none, because he can’t. But that’s what the traditional media has come to: employing the same kind of baseless attacks that they so often claim are the exclusive domain of the blogosphere.

Coleman also lets slip something that tells us quite a bit about the mentality of today’s press:

Powerline is the biggest link in a daisy chain of right-wing blogs that is assaulting the Mainstream Media while they toot their horns in the service of ... what? The downtrodden? No, that was yesterday’s idea of the purpose of journalism.

That’s funny; I always thought the purpose of journalism was to describe noteworthy events, to tell what happened. No, in Coleman’s world, the purpose of the media is to “toot their horns in the service of [...] the downtrodden.” Of course, they get to decide who’s downtrodden, they get to decide how the downtrodden should be served—it always seems to be through the election of liberals or the support of big government programs—and they get to decide what facts to leave out and what details to spin in order to further their goals. Gotta give Coleman credit for honesty, but I bet he wishes he could take back that bit of candor, because it proves that he’s a “journalist” with an agenda—and that he thinks the rest of the media shares this agenda.

I suspect the traditional media’s real gripe with PowerLine is that they had the audacity to report that a network news anchorman used forged documents in an obvious attempt to take down a sitting president during election campaign. The Dan Rather scandal proves that the media’s monopolistic control on the flow of information is over. The next Woodward and Bernstein are as likely to be quietly typing next to you in a coffee shop as they are to be meeting mystery men in the shadows of a parking garage.

The age of commentary-disguised-as-news is coming to a close, and that may be what really steams Coleman. Bloggers at least respect their audience enough to be up front about their opinions instead of hiding behind false claims of objective reporting. Journalists who sprinkle their enlightened words on the masses from on high, who pretend to be objective but unwittingly reveal their opinions at every turn, they are a dying breed and they know it. People who are secure in their positions rarely resort to Coleman’s sort of hysterics.

When the epitaph is written on this current age of journalism, I suspect a little asterisk will be reserved for Nick Coleman. He seems to be insisting on the most public flame-out possible.

Update: 
A rather annoyed reader sent an interesting anonymous note in response to this article.