Watch Out for Them Bloggers!
Joe Strupp
warns reporters in E&P with the cautionary tale of Nick Coleman and Power Line.
If you don't believe that bloggers are giving newspapers a headache, talk to Nick Coleman. A veteran newspaper columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Coleman is in the middle of an old-fashioned feud with one of the leading conservative Web logs in the country.
Actually they are giving Coleman a headache; the headache that Coleman
inflicted on his own paper is described here:
But Coleman's problems didn't end there. Shortly after the New Year, TCF Bank Chairman and CEO Bill Cooper wrote an angry letter to the Star-Tribune vowing never to buy advertising in the paper again. Cooper was incensed that Coleman's column had attempted to link the blog to TCF, while allegedly hinting that some readers should withdraw their money from the finance company. "I have nothing to do with that blog and Coleman never talked to me," Cooper says now. "It's 'Dan Rather' journalism."
TCF is the employer of one of the Power Line bloggers, and you've gotta love Bill Cooper's perfect quip about "Dan Rather journalism".
The rest of the story continues on in this line about poor Nick Coleman and those
nasty bloggers.
He (Coleman) also claims that the blogs are dangerous because they are not under the same ethical restrictions as mainstream media and seek to stay on the attack, facts be damned. He contends "the mainstream media is under assault."
No. Facts be damned is not part of it, and that's the point. Coleman, like Dan Rather, was the one who got facts wrong, and he's paying for it. If Power Line made mistakes and didn't correct them, folks would hound them. Conservatives disagree over things all the time; I've even disagreed with
Hugh Hewitt on rare occasions.
BTW, this article is a classic of old media; no links to the source documents so you can check things out yourself. The Power Line/Coleman slugfest has been well-covered in the blogs, start with
a search here.
