May 2002 Archive

Michael Kinsley jumps into second place after today's column criticizing Dick Cheney for accounting problems at Halliburton: "It would be the sheerest demagoguery to suggest that a person should take the blame for a company's shenanigans just because he happened to be CEO at the time. Heck, no. That's what accountants are for."

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With only five columns so far in 2002, Rabinowitz doesn't have the minimum number of two columns per month to qualify for the top ten list. The only other columnist with so few columns is Robert Kagan of the Washington Post.

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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.

The obvious point in common about the monster-greats -- LBJ, FDR, Nixon, Clinton and, I would add, John F. Kennedy -- is that they all were maniacally driven men. They got the presidency because, in large measure, they wanted it so much that they were, in a sense, mad; they were great because they were monsters.

Most of Kelly's references to the presidents are evaluated as neutral, because, as seen in the above passage, he simultaneously praises and criticizes them. He tentatively classifies George W. Bush with Eisenhower and Truman, as "accidents: those who were great because greatness was thrust on them, not because they were driven to greatness."

With that column, Kelly drops behind Robert L. Bartley into third place. His ranking has been volatile lately, because his Median PI (median of the group of individual column PI's) has been swinging back and forth. Here is the ordered list of his column PI's (negative numbers indicate Republican-leaning columns): -100, -100, -90, -83, -75, -67, -60, -50, -6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100. Today's column (-6) changed the median value from -50 to -28 (halfway between the -50 and -6). I guess this lack of robustness is just a basic consequence of the small sample size. One reader suggested a different statistical approach which might help; I'll have to look into it.

Travel: I'll be on a business trip for the rest of the week. I should be able to update the site from the road, although the comments may have to be brief or nonexistent.

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Colbert I. King created another such anomaly by pounding Senator Robert Byrd in a March column with 36 negative references. When combined with his usually non-political columns, King's "Negative Democratic Index" was misleadingly high until it was reduced by his recent Kathleen Kennedy Townsend column.

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ON BEING PARTISAN

I gather, from reading MediaWhoresOnline, that some group has pronounced me highly "partisan". Here are my thoughts on all that:

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Bush administration was, in a fundamental way, being dishonest about its economic plans. Suppose that the numbers used to justify the tax cut were clearly bogus, and that the plan was in fact obviously a budget-buster. Suppose that the Social Security reform plan simply ignored the system's existing obligations, and thus purported to offer something for nothing. Suppose that the Cheney energy report deliberately misstated the nature of the country's actual energy problems, and used that misstatement to justify subsidies to the energy industry.

Suppose also that I found myself writing an economics column as these plans were being sold -- and that I was a highly competent economist, if I say so myself. Suppose that as an economist able to do my own analysis, not obliged to rely on conflicting quotes from the usual suspects, I was in a position to spot right away that some of the stuff being peddled made no sense - and clued in enough to get hold of experts who could tell me what was wrong with the other stuff. Suppose that I had been repeatedly proved right in my critiques of the Bush administration's assertions, even in cases where nobody else in the media was willing to take my criticisms seriously -- for example, suppose that, because I understand microeconomics a lot better than your average columnist, I realized that economists who said that California's electricity crisis had a lot to do with market manipulation were probably right, more than a year before conventional wisdom was willing to contemplate the possibility.

In this hypothetical situation, what sort of columns should I have been writing? Does the ideal of "nonpartisanship" mean that I should have mixed my critiques of Bush policies with praise, or with attacks on the hapless, ineffectual Democrats, just for the sake of perceived balance? Given what I knew to be the truth, would that even have been ethical?

I've reported; you decide.

But Mr. Krugman's argument seems to be that while his 37 columns so far this year have been largely negative toward Republicans, they have been appropriate because there have not been legitimate opportunities for either praise for Bush policies or attacks on Democrats. But I believe that the reason that Mr. Krugman's partisanship ranking is currently so high is that he has written about some issues in a much more one-sided way than other columnists writing about those same topics. For example, compare Mr. Krugman's series of Enron articles with those by fellow Times columnist Frank Rich (go to the the Krugman and Rich pages for links to all of their 2002 columns). Krugman and Rich each mentioned Enron over 50 times and attacked various members of the Bush administration and other Republicans with equal vehemence, but there was a major difference. First, Mr. Rich also noted that there are Democratic links to Enron. He discussed both Robert Rubin and Joe Lieberman, but Mr. Krugman did not mention either one. More importantly, Mr. Rich also discussed in detail the similarity of the Global Crossing situation to Enron. By my count he mentioned Global Crossing and Terry McAuliffe eight times each in his columns, while Mr. Krugman made only one mention of each. On the other side of the street, Republican pundits Michael Kelly and Robert L. Bartley each strained to write an entire column on Enron without a single mention of the extensive Republican connections.

So part of the reason that Mr. Krugman's partisanship score is more than three times larger than Mr. Rich's is that, unlike Mr. Rich, he focused exclusively on the Republican connections to Enron, while ignoring or minimizing Democratic aspects to the same story. Lying in Ponds will not try to ascribe motives to anyone; it will just continue for the rest of 2002 to try (imperfectly of course) to measure how consistently each pundit's arguments tend to align along party lines. The premise is that over time, any independent pundit will find many legitimate reasons to significantly criticize their own party or praise the other party. Remember that it's still early in the year and there are many opportunities for the rankings to change significantly.

Another view on Krugman's comments comes from the Amateur Economist.

Formatting note: Because this comments column has been getting very long, I'm trying a couple of changes. This side of the page should now be wider. I removed a couple of columns (Total PI and Median PI) from the ranking tables to save some space on the right side.


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Krugman Watch Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman criticizes the Bush administration for not criticizing a company that has decided, for now, not to take advantage of a tax loophole that long predates the Bush administration. No wonder Krugman has been named America's "most partisan pundit."

The WSJ list isn't comprehensive -- Holman Jenkins and Mary O'Grady are WSJ regulars, for instance -- but the difference seems to lie in definitions. The ratings are only for "political" columnists. Jenkins is an economics columnist, while O'Grady covers the Americas. But dropping these less partisan pundits from the WSJ mix, while including Thomas Friedman of the NYT, skews the results. Just because Jenkins doesn't turn his columns into anti-Democrat screeds doesn't mean he isn't doing the same thing Paul Krugman is supposed to do. (The WSJ's 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner, Dorothy Rabinowitz, also isn't included, but she doesn't write on a regular schedule.)

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Peggy Noonan, for example, is a self-declared partisan. Robert Bartley has conducted a campaign of provably false and vicious accusations against Democrats, notably Clinton. They would probably be pained to be thought of as less partisan than Paul Krugman. But as skilled professional partisans, they would be most approving of the dishonest methodology being used by this column to-- it seems pretty obvious to me-- target Paul Krugman.
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Your methodology really does not disclose anything of importance. Take a look at Paul Krugman--he has 251 negative Republican references, all about either Bush, the administration, or the Bush administration. They are the ones in power. It is Bush, or his administration that, as President is driving the national agenda. Thus, total references to Bush and his administration make up about 5/6ths of the references.
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Right Wing Poser Alert! 'Lying in Ponds' Site Is a Liberal-Bashing Front Group

In an effort to counter the growing realization by the public that the "liberal media" not only does not exist - but never did! - the rightwingers have launched a new front site: "Lying in Ponds." The heading claims the site is dedicated to exposing "the absurdity of partisanship" in pundits (which is absurd in itself because pundits ARE about partisanship!). But a glance at the site shows that the pundits that top their hit list are the few who regularly criticize the Bush Reich - while rightwing pundits are given just a few mildly critical comments. Just a might bit telling, doncha think that out of a field where rightwing pundits like Limbaugh et al outnumber liberals by about 20 to 1, that the liberals top their list? A closer look and you discover that the front man for the site, in true rightwing poser fashion, has NO credentials whatsoever in journalism, politics, or media criticsm: he is a meteorologist! Like the righting's "global warming experts" who have MBAs!

Partisanship, Not Ideology