Does Nick Coleman need professional help?
Rathergate.com
Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But if he doesn’t, Minneapolis Star Tribune star columnist Nick Coleman needs to get fired.
Is the Strib’s star columnist harassing people? What depths does a star columnist have to sink to before his employer does something about it? Let’s find out, shall we?
I blogged here April 19 about an unhinged, unmedicated e-mail that Coleman sent to Jay Rosen of Press Think. As you are all aware, Coleman’s column about Power Line drew instant ridicule around the blogosphere, and inspired Rathergate.com’s annual Coleman Award for the craziest MSM blog-bashing. The Strib has taken the infamous column off of its site.
Re-visiting the now-closed thread on Rosen’s blog, I noticed that Rosen had this to add, indicating that the Strib’s star columnist, to put it politely, has problems. This is part of Rosen’s response to an allegation that he got drawn into a feud between Coleman and the Minnesota bloggers who endlessly torment him:
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… Thing is, I don’t get out my scorecard, turn on my motive-detection machine, and total up whose side is going to be helped or hurt before I post something. If the bloggers tormenting Coleman have a little extra material because of what he wrote to me, I’m not going to get too upset about it.
Coleman is a clown, and a professional embarrassment to the Star-Tribune. (I agree with your comparison to [Colorado professor Ward “Little Eichmanns”] Churchill, by the way.) They created him and now have to deal with him. From Wednesday afternoon to Thursday evening I received 15 abusive e-mails from Coleman. I printed only the first one; the others have much richer material for his “fans” out there. [blogger’s emphasis]
He said he was contemplating retaliation in his column, and said he would follow up with my university[blogger’s emphasis]– the kind of threats that the right wing crazies make when they get going on “leftist academic” this and “you liberals” that.
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Fifteen abusive e-mails over a 24-hour period?! “Contemplating retaliation in his column”?!? If I did something like this, I would be fired on the spot, as would about 95 percent of this country’s journalists.
There are (at least) two sides to every story, as we love to say in the biz (journalism, that is — in the military biz, we love to say, “get some,” “hooah” and the like). But Rosen has done nothing unethical to provoke Coleman. Coleman wrote a stupid column (not the infamous Powerline column, but stupid nonetheless) and a stupid e-mail, and Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University with a pedigree longer than my arm, wrote two critiques. Being criticized for your work is par for the course in journalism.
I e-mailed Rosen about the whole kerfuffle, and he summarized the heart of his beef with Coleman [I added the links]:
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Columnists shouldn’t be bullies. Only bad columnists are. I have problems with Nick Coleman for that reason– bad journalist, bad writer, miserable fact-collector, a person of prejudices rather than ideas. These are intellectual disagreements, at heart. He wrote a really dumb column about blogs, and I answered it. Then he wrote a dumb e-mail and I published it. I withheld the others as a courtesy to the Strib, an organization I have no beef with. I know people there and I respect them.
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I encouraged Rosen to e-mail the Strib’s ombudsman about this — I mean, lack of professionalism aside, 15 abusive e-mails and threats of print retaliation is harassment, isn’t it? (I say this, of course, having seen only the first of Coleman’s messages, but Rosen said on his blog that the remaining 14 have plenty of source material for Coleman’s many detractors.)
Rosen was one step ahead of me and said that the ombudsman, or “reader representative” had visited his site. But will Coleman be held accountable? Doubtful.
Again, I think we see a pampered “star” columnist who is above the rules, just like I think happened in the case of Mitch Albom at the Detroit Free Press. Come to think of it, I can’t say what rules, if any, that the Strib has regarding columnists. If you remember, Powerline called an editor and asked, and the editor didn’t have an answer (another head shaking in disbelief worth reading is Jim Geraghty at TKS).
I touched on the phenomenon of star journalists too big for their britches in my essay “Mitch Albom and Journalism’s Second Dirtiest Little Secret.” But there is a difference here that the Strib’s editors need to get a handle on quickly — Coleman sure as hell is no Mitch Albom. Albom is a best-selling author and radio personality as well as columnist; as a matter of full disclosure, I gave my mother “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” for Christmas 2003.
On the other hand, I am a professional journalist and I had never heard of the Strib until Coleman’s famous rant. In my mind, Coleman is the face of the Strib. That is NOT good for business, and don’t take my word for it — TCF Bank pulled its advertising from the Strib over the same column.
Apparently, Coleman’s editors don’t give a hoot that their loose cannon is making an on-line mockery of the Strib, not to mention the aforementioned annual advertising loss valued at $250,000. Is he worth it? Not particularly, if you’ve ever suffered through his columns.
I ask you and the Strib — what does an employee of the Star Tribune have to do to get suspended or fired? Kill someone?
Let me close with another glimpse into my personal life. As a squad leader in an Infantry company, I’ve had to make a judgment call on more than one occasion over whether a trooper was mentally healthy enough to carry a weapon, ammunition or explosives in the wake of a stupid run-in with the law, problems at home or just being unable to “hack it.”
There’s something not right about Nick Coleman. He needs a break, at bare minimum, from the keyboard. And if his supervisors do not think that his recent behavior is out of line, there’s something not right about them, either.
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Before I expose the severity of Coleman’s ethical lapse, let me justify my position by sharing a little personal history with you. I’ve never professed to be a perfect being, and this will prove it:
Once upon a time, I wrote an in-depth package on whether reduced class sizes improve education as much as educators claim. I cited studies on both sides, well-known authors and grass-roots activists. It was as balanced a product as one could imagine. However, a retired teacher wrote me back and concluded that because he did not like my choice of sources, not to mention even lending credibility to the other side of the story, I therefore was a Holocaust revisionist.
I fired back a reply — not nearly as off-the-wall as Coleman’s, and not containing any curse words, but definitely angry. My managing editor e-mailed me to say yes, the reader was way out of line (especially for a teacher), but that my reply was unacceptable conduct for the newspaper. I was not asked to apologize, but I did so anyway. Months after the fact, that one outburst was still an albatross around my neck when it came to a promotion.
Let’s step out of Sgt. Craver’s way-back machine and come back to Coleman. |
