At the very end of December in 2004, Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune surprised a lot of folks in the Blogosphere when he wrote his infamous screed attacking the boys at Power Line as (among other things) "Extreme bloggers [who] are so hip and cool they can make fun of the poor and the disadvantaged while working out of paneled bank offices."

This year, as Patterico writes, "You know you’ve arrived when an L.A. Times columnist compares you to a dishonest, totalitarian Stalinist apparatchik".

Michael Hiltzik of the Times definitely gets bonus points for taking a fresh slant with the Stalinist angle--because, let's face it, that whole Hitler thing was done to death in 2004.

But a point that one of Glenn Reynolds' readers made during the Coleman meltdown holds true with Hiltzik's:

One of the nation's leading papers now has an opinion writer who has picked a fight with a leading blog. It's practically incidental that the columnist appears to be losing. One of the rules of politics is that you try not to give your adversary any publicity, unless you have to. You don't mention the fellow's name. Even just a year ago, no one in the MSM would have entered into a debate with a blogger. Today, Coleman seems to feel threatened enough by Powerline that he has to attack them. How much does that say about the extraordinary growth of the Internet - and bloggers - as sources of news? To me, it seems that we've reached another major marker of the decline of the MSM.

I'm not sure if Hiltzik's ad hominems count as a major marker themselves, but they do mark a curious flipover, as readers increasingly talk back to their newspapers via blogs, and as those same newspapers continue to go from attacking the powerful, to attacking their readers.

Update: Chris Anderson, the creator of the great Long Tail meme writes:

Q: How can you tell when an industry is on the rocks?

A: When insiders and analysts start to lose their temper in public.

And usually, it doesn't take an industry analyst to discover who or what their vitriol is aimed at.

Another Update (1/06/06): Tom Maguire and Cathy Seipp have much more on Hiltzik. Meanwhile, Independent Sources adds up the yay and nay comments on Hiltzik's own blog and concludes:

Hiltzik had the home court advantage and still got clobbered. Worse, in our opinion, he came off as trite, hypocritical and elitist. If he stuck to writing “business” articles we wouldn’t have a problem with him. Alternatively, if he was in the Editorial section of the paper where it appears he’d really prefer to be, we would also have no gripe with his right to editorialize to his heart’s content. We’re open-minded, he might even change our point of view on a particular topic. However to do that he’ll have to do a far better job than what he did in attacking Patterico and Hewitt.

Indeed.