Frequent L.A. Times critic Patterico writes:

I read something disturbing last night about the way the editor of the L.A. Times views criticism of his newspaper. Apparently, editor Dean Baquet sees criticism as something to “push back” against.

And, he may be planning to use the pages of the printed newspaper itself to “push back” against the paper’s blogger critics — including, very possibly, myself. [UPDATE: The “pushback” against Times critic Hugh Hewitt has already begun — see UPDATE below.]

Here are the details:

Read the rest. As Patterico adds:

It’s a far cry from the days when folks like myself were actually invited onto the paper’s own op-ed pages to make our criticisms heard.

And that’s a real shame.

Yes it is--but it's a development that says much about the increasing power of blogs, and the heat they can generate. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Nick Coleman decided to end 2004 in a self-immolating bang because he popped a vein over the newly ascendant Power Line blog. This prompted one of Glenn Reynolds' readers to note, astutely:

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.

Surely the L.A. Times' plan to "push back" against their critics is yet another marker.

Update: A much uglier example of a sort of push back, here.