Pundit Boxscore for Wednesday 1 January 2003

PARTISAN PUNDITRY 2002: After evaluating all 2,129 columns written by our 37 pundits in 2002, it's time to draw some conclusions. I've stressed all along that Lying in Ponds is attempting to make a distinction between ordinary party preference (there's nothing wrong with being opinionated or having a political ideology) and excessive partisanship ("blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance"). While it's obviously difficult to draw a definitive line, the top three pundits in the rankings clearly revealed excessive partisanship by the remarkable consistency of their extremely one-sided commentary throughout the year. The New York Times' Paul Krugman took the partisanship lead early and lapped the field. In a year in which Mr. Krugman generated lots of buzz and won an award, his 18:1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references and 99 columns without a single substantive deviation from the party line were unmatched in the Lying in Ponds portion of the punditocracy. During the course of the year, I've discussed Mr. Krugman's view of partisanship, his thoughts on "balance", his treatment of the Enron scandal, and his columns in 2000.

From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal, Collin Levey and Claudia Rosett earned their high rankings by following a very simple formula -- all Democrats are bad. While Ms. Levey avoided making a single positive Democratic reference in her 26 columns, Ms. Rosett did manage to praise Franklin Roosevelt -- perhaps the statute of limitations was somehow involved.

While the rest of the Top Ten pundits often wrote very partisan columns, each showed at least flickers of intellectual independence by finding that some issues were more complex than RNC or DNC propaganda might indicate. Robert L. Bartley and Michael Kelly generally avoided writing about issues uncomfortable for Republicans (Enron, Trent Lott), or wrote about them in a way which deflected the blame. Both also pummeled Bill Clinton with regularity, but each found a few reasons to criticize their own party,

Mary McGrory and Frank Rich thrashed Republicans with enthusiasm, but were also capable of very sharp criticism of Democrats. Mr. Rich's attention to the bipartisan aspects of Enron and other corporate scandals was particulary impressive; his coverage constrasted sharply with the exhaustive but blinkered treatment of Mr. Krugman. Daniel Henninger and Michael Kinsley spent enough column space on non-partisan topics to hold down their partisanship scores. Pete du Pont demonstrated independence by writing two columns of substantive criticism of the Bush administration over the issue of steel tariffs.

ON TO 2003: Starting today, a revised roster of pundits will appear in the daily boxscores, but the final 2002 statistics will be left up for a week or two. Stay tuned to see if any of the new faces (Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Ann Coulter, Molly Ivins, Thomas Oliphant, Clarence Page, Robert Scheer, Thomas Sowell, Cal Thomas, and Walter Williams) will be able to challenge Mr. Krugman for the 2003 partisanship title.