June 2002 Archive

Girl, eight years ago I was on the ropes, dressed in my little pink suit, defending my measly $100,000 windfall and my down-home real estate projects, and (here's another handy phrase) just "trying to find my way through." Today I'm worth millions, I've got a seat in the Senate, and my eye on the White House (if I can just keep Bill on ice for another two years). Martha, look and learn. Or the day will come when you realize you mighta said shoulda, coulda, woulda--but you didn't.

Although she presents a litany of criticism against Ms. Clinton worthy of a Michael Kelly or Robert L. Bartley column, the style of the column results in only two negative Democratic references. While the partisanship index of the column appropriately has a value of -100 (Republican), the effect of the column on Rosett's overall index will be less than it should be. My take is that it may be impossible to avoid this kind of thing, and that it shouldn't be too bad as long as it random rather than systematic.

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The last few days have seen several jargon-filled attacks on the Bush administration from prominent commentators, including Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman of the New York Times and filmmaker and author Michael Moore. All three have used loaded, manipulative rhetoric to suggest the same thing: President Bush is attempting to make himself a dictator.
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If Dowd, Krugman and Moore wish to disagree with Bush's policies, they should do so on the merits, rather than attempting to discredit them by suggesting Bush wants to appoint himself dictator. Lurid claims about "paranoid nightmares" and fictitious threats are not substantive contributions to the debate.

POLITICAL SITE OF THE DAY: Thanks to aboutpolitics.com for making Lying in Ponds their political site of the day yesterday!

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Readers may wonder why mentions of George Stephanopoulos in the Kinsley column are not considered Democratic references. The approach is to consider references to Stephanopoulos in his role as a Clinton White House staffer as Democratic, but not to his current role as a member of the media. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is on the same list of ambiguous references. Another twist is former Republican Senator and Clinton cabinet member William Cohen -- the classification of each reference to him depends on the context.


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Why don't you evaluate the partisanship of reporters instead of columnists? Reporters are the ones who are supposed to be unbiased.

While it would be interesting to evaluate reporters, I've decided to focus on pundits. Because of limited time, I can't even evaluate nearly as many pundits as I would like.


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Your premise is ludicrous. What matters in credibility of pundits is not partisanship, but truthfulness and accuracy. Pundits are expected to have a bias, they are supposed to have opinions, and if they can defend their bias in a factual manner, they are doing readers a service.

So here's a proposed FAQ entry:

What's wrong with pundits being partisan? They are expected to have a bias.

Lying in Ponds is trying to draw a distinction between ordinary bias and excessive partisanship. Pundits are expected to have a bias toward one or the other party -- nowhere is it suggested that they should be perfectly balanced between the two parties. Instead, the hypothesis is that a very high partisanship index over a significant period of time suggests that a pundit is going beyond ideological bias to portray the world in a simple way -- one party as the good guys and/or the other as the bad guys. If you accept the premise that the world is more complicated than that, then a very partisan pundit is not offering a truthful or accurate picture, even if they are careful to be accurate in the particulars of their arguments. Lying in Ponds expects pundits to be independent, not neutral. Over time, any truthful and accurate pundit will be forced to take note of positive things about the other party and shortcomings in their own, and the ranking system is an imperfect attempt to measure that.

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RASPBERRY AGAIN: Today's William Raspberry column contains part of his recent North Carolina State University commencement address, but it doesn't include the section I had highlighted in a comment from last month. The Raleigh News & Observer carried the full text of his speech, including:

Yet we seldom take the effort to recruit allies from among those who hold views different from our own. Conservatives are (to liberals) people who don't care about minorities, or women, or "the little people," not decent men and women who have a different view of what works. Liberals are (to conservatives) people who want only to tax and spend the country into bankruptcy, not thoughtful men and women who want America to work for everyone. Each sees the other as enemy.

Surprisingly often, I have discovered, a focus on the problem, rather than on political enemies, could disclose common interests and lead to innovative solutions.

POPULARITY AND PARTISANSHIP?: There was an interesting question asked in the NPR interview which was edited out of the final segment. Bob Garfield noted that many of the pundits with the highest partisanship scores are also the best-known or most "popular" (e.g. Krugman, Kinsley, Noonan, Kelly). I fumbled around and agreed with him, but I'm not sure after looking at the numbers. First, I don't really know how to tell which pundits are the most popular. Maybe there is some kind of list of which columnists are the most widely-syndicated or something like that? If anyone knows of such a thing, let me know.

But it seems like the big names are fairly well-distributed throughout the list -- Dowd is in the middle, and Broder, Friedman, Dionne, Will, and Safire are near the end. So count me skeptical about any strong relationship between partisanship and popularity.


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Salam also mentions Cohen's drawing of unfavorable parallels between George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson; Jim Hoagland does the same thing in his column today.


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Some months ago an academic colleague -- a man with strong Democratic connections urged me to write a couple of columns praising the Bush administration. "What should I praise?" I asked. There was a long pause -- funny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself? -- but eventually he came up with something: "How about its commitment to free trade?"

Repeating a comment made in this space from last month: "The assumption of Lying in Ponds is that over any period of many months or longer there will invariably arise issues and news events which favor Democrats and also those which favor Republicans. It is not expected that pundits should be neutral in the way they write about the two parties, or that they should feign nonpartisanship. Lying in Ponds is completely in favor of vigorous debate from across the political spectrum, including the kind of sharp criticism of the Bush administration skillfully practiced by Mr. Krugman."

Other Democratic-leaning pundits have much lower partisanship scores than Mr. Krugman not because they have lavished praise on the Bush administration, but because they have found that some of the same issues covered exhaustively by Mr. Krugman may be, in fact, more complex than the simple Republicans=Bad formula he seems to favor. See the discussion below of the Enron issue from a few days ago.

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We knew all we needed to know about Bill Clinton from his willingness to award himself a mulligan when his ball failed to take the desired path. In golf, fraud quickly becomes apparent.

Measuring Pundits Partisanship
OTM gets emails week after week telling us we need to do a story on the popularity of weblogs. And we've consistently - and politely - ignored this advice . . . until now. Weblog LyingInPonds.com applies computational analysis to rank the partisanship of columnists at three major newspapers. Bob gets the stats from blogger Ken Waight.

Yesterday's comment listed the pundits who have referenced Enron most often this year. Following are capsule summaries of how the Lying in Ponds Top Ten have treated the Enron story in 2002:

1. Paul Krugman: Mr. Krugman has mentioned Enron in nearly half of his columns this year, a total of 99 times. Despite this intensive coverage, Krugman has (unlike Frank Rich, see below) studiously avoided mentioning Democratic connections to Enron and has mentioned the parallel Global Crossing scandal only once. In his January 29 column, Krugman says: "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."
2. Michael Kinsley: Mr. Kinsley has written very little about Enron, only four references this year.
3. Robert L. Bartley: With 35 references to Enron in 2002, Mr. Bartley has definitely not ignored the scandal. But he has been careful to limit his criticism to the company itself, without even acknowledging extensive Republican links. He also attempts to dilute and deflect the scandal, most notably in his March 18 column entitled Post-Clinton Standards: "When the Enron story was breaking back in January, I wrote here that the ultimate explanation was 'the societal collapse of standards and morality over the last three decades or so. As a society we seem increasingly incapable of sitting in judgment of each other.'"
4. Peggy Noonan: Ms. Noonan mentions Enron 27 times, mostly to criticize the company itself. She criticizes Republicans, but very gingerly, and in a way which puts them in the best light. In her January 25 column, Noonan says "I believe that conservatives and Republicans have a special responsibility, as the party that stands for free markets, to see to it that free markets work, and are not abused, gamed or finagled."
5. Collin Levey: Ms. Levey makes only one offhand reference to Enron.
6. Michael Kelly: Ditto for Mr. Kelly, only one Enron reference.
7. Mary McGrory: Ms. McGrory comes in third in Enron references with 64. While never mentioning Global Crossing, she does note Democratic Enron links several times.
8. Frank Rich: Although Mr. Rich leads the field with an astonishing 114 Enron references in only 7 (out of only 10) columns, he gets major credit here for providing a far more balanced view of the Enron scandal than most of his peers. He slashes Republicans unmercifully, but does not spare Democrats caught in the Enron web, and also discusses the Global Crossing scandal more than any pundit in these rankings (13 references). From his February 16 column: "Democrats want to believe that Enron is the Republicans' Armageddon. Republicans hope Global Crossing will prove the Democrats' comeuppance. Dream on. Political cross- dressing is a distinguishing feature of this systemic scandal, much of it entirely legal, in which the only currency that counts comes in green, not the red and blue of the electoral map. As countless Democrats have turned up on the lists of Enron and Arthur Andersen campaign beneficiaries, so the former President Bush is among those who joined Mr. McAuliffe in test-riding the Global Crossing gravy train."
9. Thomas J. Bray: Much like his colleague Robert L. Bartley, Mr. Bray creatively deflects Enron criticism away from Republicans. His approach is shown by this breathtakingly outrageous paragraph from his February 12 column: "For Democrats, the Enron hysteria is a convenient way to keep the economy off balance. A slow or nonexistent recovery might help them at the polls next fall. For Republicans, Enron's collapse poses an agonizing dilemma: whether to protect the wealth-creation process and thus risk charges of fronting for corporate crooks, or whether to join the witch hunt in hopes of moderating the outcome."
10. Claudia Rosett: Ms. Rosett concentrates on international issues; she has not mentioned Enron.