Comments, Boxscores

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.

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It's fun -- no, really!

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Every time I happen upon Lying in Ponds, I am amazed at just how much work can go into producing something so entirely useless.

First, the proprietor is attempting to "fight partisanship", which is kind of dumb when you're "fighting" the partisan leanings of opinion writers. The worthlessness of the goal, however, pales in comparison to the methodology, which basically seems to be Coulteresque word counts with even less rational thought involved. In a post, he expounds this genius bit:

When a partisan figure's actual words are quoted, it is generally evaluated as a positive reference, even if the columnist then criticizes those words.

So, if I quote someone, even if the quote is meant to give a negative impression of the person, it's a positive reference. I see.

The kicker is that the fool takes TAPped's side in their debate with Somerby. That's just wrong.

The first point comes up constantly -- aren't opinion writers supposed to be partisan? Well, they have a perfect right to be, but I'm not aware of any pundits on the Lying in Ponds roster (or any others) who admit to being partisan. Paul Krugman explicitly rejected the notion earlier this year. I've repeatedly said (see the philosophy page) that I expect pundits to have "partisan leanings", but that I'm trying to make a fundamental distinction between ordinary party preference and actual partisanship, as in this dictionary definition of partisan:

1 : a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

Concerning the criticism of the methodology, "word counts" are a simple, imperfect tool. But it seems to me to be a reasonable attempt to quantify the tendency of partisan political writers to distort the obvious complexity of politics into a simplistic "good party/bad party" formulation. Frank Rich is an example of an opinionated, ideological columnist who manages to look beyond the party label and take consistent, principled positions.

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Archives

• December 2002
  
• November 2002
  
  • Krugman 2000
  • Ideological yet Independent
• October 2002
  
  • Dowd and the Rule of Laws
• September 2002
  
  • Metafilter
  • Enron By Month
  • Example of Evaluation of References
  • Offhand References
• August 2002
  
• July 2002
  
  • Six Month Reviews
• June 2002
  
  • Paul Krugman and Balance
  • On The Media
  • Enron as a Scandal Case Study
  • Most 2002 References to the Word "Enron"
• May 2002
  
  • Paul Krugman's view
  • Howard Kurtz column
  • Tapped, Andrew Sullivan, democrats.com

Lying in Ponds is an attempt to quantify and analyze partisanship in the American punditocracy. Lying in Ponds believes that a lack of excessive partisanship is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for constructive punditry. The views of pundits who are excessively partisan cannot be taken seriously, because their ulterior motives or uncontrolled biases are certain to frequently contaminate their judgements. Lying in Ponds currently tracks the Democratic and Republican biases of all of the regular political columnists from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal, and the Washington Post. Lying in Ponds on Yahoo

FINAL 2002 Lying in Ponds Top Ten

2002 Most Partisan Pundit Teams

Other Statistics

The Pundits

Punditry and Political Resources

Some of the sharpest political commentary on the web can be found at Mickey Kaus' kausfiles.com.

Eric Alterman's book Sound and Fury : The Making of the Punditocracy, has an excellent history of the development of political punditry in this country. Alterman discusses his interesting and provocative ideas about how to elevate the level of pundit discourse. It is a valuable book despite the distracting ideological baggage. Mr. Alterman now has his own blog, Altercation, which is lively and has the added advantage of referring to one of my very favorite Python sketches, "The Argument Clinic".

The American Prospect has a great weblog called Tapped.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz "keeps a watchful eye on the national media."

According to Dr. Andrew R. Cline: "The Rhetorica Network, including my Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal web log, is my attempt to explain the persuasive tactics of politics and the press." His discussion of media bias is very good.

The National Public Radio's On the Media program has lots of interesting stuff.

Economics professor Brad DeLong publishes his "thoughts of the moment on economics, and on other topics as well" in his Semi-Daily Journal.

Susanna Cornett publishes Cut on the Bias: "keeping an eye on the spins and weirdness of media, crime and everyday life."

"Got my mind on the media, and the media on my mind", Media Minded is written by an anonymous "copy editor at one of America's largest daily newspapers."

Dean Esmay is "Defending the liberal tradition in history, politics, science and philosophy" on his blog, Dean's World.

Punditwatch is Will Vehrs' "twice-weekly review of the pundits".

One of my favorite old TV shows was Fernwood Tonight, which starred Martin Mull as a sarcastic talk show host. I remember him telling guests that they were "so close to being interesting." That's the way I feel about Bob Somerby's The Daily Howler. He sporadically posts articles skewering (usually justifiably) members of the press for "howlers", which he defines as "stupid and ridiculous logical blunders". It would be so much better if Somerby were able to overcome his obvious partisan bias. He received a lot of attention during the 2000 campaign by defending Al Gore (his former Harvard roommate) from unfair criticism.

Life Outside the Punditocracy

James Lilek's Daily Bleat is an outstanding, ecclectic weblog. It's all great, even the baby pictures, dog pictures and frequently-changing page designs.

On its FAQ page, the prolific InstaPundit writing team, pretending to be a single Tennessee law professor named Glenn Reynolds, responds to the question "Aren't you biased to the left? Aren't you biased to the right? Aren't you a jingoistic, libertarian, cultural imperialist?", with "Yes." Instapundit is an excellent starting point for an exploration of the world of weblogs ("blogging").

My friend Paul's poetry site, haiku in low places.

Raleigh blogger Don McArthur dispenses blather at the Misanthropyst.

Blogger Lee Ann Morawski (formerly of Chapel Hill) dishes out "opinion, insight, commentary, sarcasm, scathing polemic, and wit" at Spinsters.