If you’re a fan of schadenfreude – and who isn’t, as long as you’re not its object — don’t miss the Night of the Long Knives at ABC News, currently being conducted in public over at the the New York Observer.

“Ugly” isn’t the word to describe the hatchets that are out for former ABC News v.p. and senior producer Mimi Gurbst, who recently announced her forthcoming retirement from the failing news operation to become — wait for it — a high-school guidance counselor.

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What provoked this tempest was a May 11 sendoff in the pages of the Observer by Felix Gillette:

In recent years, when she wasn’t putting together stories as a senior producer for ABC’s World News or helping to oversee global news-gathering operations as a network vice president, Mimi Gurbst liked to advise her colleagues on various ways to improve their personal and professional lives.

Somewhere along the way, sources tell The Observer, Ms. Gurbst became a kind of cherished, if unofficial, career counselor at ABC News, helping countless young producers and correspondents find their way at a particularly tumultuous time in an already confusing business.

That did it. In have poured more than 125 comments, many apparently from present and former ABC News staffers, writing anonymously, who beg to differ with Gillette’s valentine to Gurbst as a kindly den mother. A sampling:

I’m sorry, but I find this story almost more than I can swallow. I spent the better part of 10 years at ABC News and Mimi Gurbst… was great with her stable of favorites and at best an obstructionist with those she didn’t like. This had nothing to do with qualifications of being a good journalist, it was simply reward and recognition for the sycophants who sucked up to her the most. ABC’s gain is some poor school’s loss…

Some rise in her defense:

Mimi helped lots of young people at ABC News who were neither well-connected nor from elite schools. Demonizing Mimi is weak and pathetic. Why is it always the female executive who is part of a “mean” group and mocked for her physical appearance? In my 15+ years at ABC News, the “mean boys” at ABC News caused far more damage than Mimi ever did… I just really hate that cowards are allowed to post vicious comments anonymously.

But the prevailing sentiment is overwhelmingly negative:

I spent more than a decade of my life as a producer for ABC… All this fury reminds me of that scene after the fall of Saddam Hussein – the one where all the angry little people push over his enormous statue, and it topples to the ground. Truth has a way of bubbling to the surface. Even in a newsroom.

The comments range far beyond Gurbst, however, heading up the food chain at ABC all the way to the top, and painting a pretty ugly picture of the news division. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, ABC’s reaction will be, but you can bet that Monday morning is going to be pretty ugly on W. 66th Street in Manhattan.

But the real story here is not Gurbst: it’s how the blogosphere has changed the balance of power. In the old days, a retirement — even one publicly noted — would have passed largely without mention; today, thanks to the internet, anyone can comment, most often anonymously, dragging the entire alleged back story into the public realm.

Is this citizen-journalism — or perhaps unchained journalist-journalism — or back-stabbing gossip?  Over the past decade or so, the MSM has gone in for gossip itself in a big way, destroying its credibility in its lust for flash and trash. As the poet says: karma’s a bitch.