Pundit Boxscore for Wednesday 11 February 2004

WHERE'S THE OJ? For the first time since Lying in Ponds began, the WSJ OpinionJournal does not have a columnist in the Top Ten partisanship rankings -- not even in the top twenty! In 2002, five of the ten most partisan columnists were from the OJ, and in 2003 two of ten were. So what's going on? Well, the OJ has gradually trimmed its list of those it classifies as regular columnists, dropping Collin Levey, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Kimberley Strassel, Thomas Bray and Tunku Varadarajan. Robert Bartley passed away late last year. I've classified John Fund (too political) and Claudia Rosett (too international) as "Inactive" and have dropped Pete du Pont (too infrequent). That leaves only Peggy Noonan, Daniel Henninger and Brendan Miniter to be evaluated, and they've all been fairly restrained so far. Even the OJ On the Editorial Page feature has dropped behind the NYT Lead Editorial in the rankings after a series of relatively balanced columns.

I think we're just seeing the effect of several weeks of consistently unfavorable news for the Bush administration. Democratic pundits are energized, pounding on Republicans over Iraq and the economy, while Republican pundits are subdued, mixing criticism of Democratic presidential candidates with criticism of the president and Congress over federal spending. But one month of columns is just a snapshot; the premise here is that a year or more of punditry will allow enough time for the true partisans to settle to the bottom (and rise to the top of the rankings).