Lying in Ponds

After seeing that the partisanship scores were becoming more and more stratified by party, I finally decided this year to split the rankings into separate lists for Democratic- and Republican-leaning pundits. The split is a recognition that in a time of one-party domination of Washington, pundits on the left and right are in different worlds. Democratic pundits have unlimited opportunities for criticism of the ruling Republicans, and their higher scores reflect that.

Paul Krugman has had the highest partisanship index of all Democratic-leaning pundits for all four years of Lying in Ponds rankings. He continued his six-year march of monolithic partisanship without a single crossover column in his entire tenure at The New York Times. His 69-1 ratio of negative-to-positive Republican references (621-9) fell just short of Ann Coulter’s 70-1 record of last year. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Krugman promised to “suggest steps to strengthen” Social Security, but never followed through, which, strangely enough, exactly mirrored the Democratic Party tactic of simply defeating George W. Bush’s Social Security initiative rather than pursuing counter-proposals. Mr. Krugman’s punditry moderated in one way — he wrote 14 non-political columns (no partisan references), mostly on economic issues. That’s a big departure from recent years (only one such column in 2004).

As in previous years, Molly Ivins and Joe Conason closely trailed Paul Krugman in the partisanship rankings. Ms. Ivins’ mind-numbing predictability was slightly enlivened by one near-crossover column, and an ever-declining level of civility, including the first use of a particular four-letter expletive in any of the approximately 7000 columns evaluated at Lying in Ponds since 2002 (not counting a Jeff Jacoby column quoting the words of others).

On the Republican side, Mark Steyn has staked a claim to the small exclusive club of excessively partisan pundits. In 26 columns, he had only 6 positive Democratic references, and 5 of those were to Joe Lieberman in one column. Of all ten Republican-leaning columnists, Mr. Steyn was the most favorable toward the doomed Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination, a strong indication of partisanship on an issue where most ideological conservatives came out strongly against Ms. Miers. Six months is a relatively small sample, so we’ll see if Mr. Steyn can remain in the thin air at the top of the partisanship rankings.

The most surprising development of 2005 was certainly the fact that Ann Coulter, winner of the last two partisanship titles, wrote no less than 7 crossover columns (with other near-misses), mostly attacking the Bush administration on both Supreme Court nominations. In previous years, she had dished out occasional criticism of the lone Democratic member of the Bush cabinet (Norman Mineta) and Arlen Specter, but this year’s crossovers were frequent enough to keep her partisanship score behind the Democratic leaders and Mark Steyn. Her attacks on Democrats continued at a somewhat reduced pace, with a ratio of 35 negative for every positive Democrat reference.

2005 was a year of structural changes for Lying in Ponds. At the beginning of the year, I switched to WordPress blogging software, replacing a homemade system of Perl scripts. In the middle of the year, the roster was revamped to consist of ten top pundits each on the left and right. Newcomers to the roster were Bob Herbert, Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson. I also decided to blog less frequently and began to examine errors and predictions in addition to partisanship. Expect to see further development of those areas in the future.

I want to thank all the readers and fellow bloggers who continue to make this fun. Peg Kaplan has been hugely gracious and encouraging; her writing almost tempts me to learn to play bridge (another time-consuming hobby!). Special thanks for a $50 donation toward the cost of a TimesSelect subscription by a reader who wished to remain anonymous, and to Jon Garfunkel, who offered a similar donation.

In Molly Ivin’s December 28 column, she seemed to urge removal of the president and to predict dire consequences if it does not occur:

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we’re up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Am I misinterpreting her words? She did say “when we lose the republic”, not “if we lose the republic”.

Then in her December 29 column, Ms. Ivins issued a correction to a previous column:

Apology: I bit on a bad story in my Dec. 20 column. The tale of the UMass-Dartmouth student who was visited by the feds for checking out Mao’s “Little Red Book” has turned out to be a hoax. So sorry.

The error was characteristic of Molly Ivins: she too quickly and gullibly grasps at any information damaging to her enemies. The correction was minimal but prompt. I’ll call it a 2-point error and a 2-point correction.

William Raspberry was on the Lying in Ponds roster from the beginning until the change in July, and the award-winning columnist has always been one of my favorites. Mr. Raspberry had already announced that he was ending his column at the end of this year, and in today’s column, he talks about his future plans:

I’ve taken it as my next-step project to help restore the faith that education can work wonders and to help another generation of young people learn to ask: What’s next?

But within my personal limitations. The problem may be nationwide, but I’ve chosen to start in my home town of Okolona, Miss. I’ve mentioned the project — Baby Steps — before. It is my attempt to renew faith in the magic of education and to spark a faith in the efficacy of community. I believe that pulling a community together around the future of its children can do wonders to transform both.

Frank Rich’s Sunday column looks at the movie “Brokeback Mountain”, and Mr. Rich predicts that it will be a hit in the heartland:

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I’ll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - “Can ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Move the Heartland?” - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on “Saturday Night Live” to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called “gay cowboy picture” than for “King Kong.”

I’ve added that to the prediction list in the sidebar to the right. It may be difficult to determine how much of a hit the movie needs to be to vindicate Mr. Rich’s prediction, but maybe it will be decisive one way or the other.

Bryan Curtis of Slate writes a profile of Frank Rich which is not very complimentary:

As someone who shares Rich’s politics and appreciates his bruising style, I find his column to be a strangely unsatisfying experience. For sure, there’s a small thrill in watching Rich turn the decaffeinated Times op-ed page into an outlet for liberal id. But it’s possible to cheer on Rich’s crusades and feel that his column leaves you short. Rarely does he offer much more than illuminating rage. It’s the kind of closed-minded liberalism that, at its heart, is the antithesis of liberalism.
. . .
One of Rich’s colleagues offered me a theory about his place in the Times universe. The writer said that whatever grief the Times catches for being too liberal is counterbalanced by the grief its New York-based correspondents get for not being liberal enough. New Yorkers assume most Timesmen share their lefty political inclinations but are too constrained by balance and integrity to smear it all over the news pages. Therefore, it is the opinion pages—Rich and Krugman’s columns in particular—where they turn for reaffirmation. It’s a kind of airtight ideological bunker that, under slightly different circumstances, would make for a great Frank Rich column.

Although Mr. Rich’s partisanship score is very high this year (based on columns since April), he has a history of some substantive criticism of Democrats. There hasn’t been much this year, but Mr. Curtis quotes Mr. Rich as saying “I think the Democrats are pathetic”.

A couple of different people have pointed me to a new book by Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment : How Good is It? How Can We Know?. A nice discussion of the book by Louis Menand can be found in The New Yorker:

Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.

As a meteorologist (and very undistinguished weather forecaster), a lot of what Mr. Tetlock says is food for thought in my own field.

UPDATE (12/15): NPR’s On The Media has the transcript of a nice interview with Mr. Tetlock. And they mention the weather!

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, I think on balance, it would be a good idea to give some serious thought to systematically monitoring political punditry. I think we monitor professionals in many other spheres of life. I think we monitor weather forecasters, we increasingly monitor stock market analysts, we sometimes monitor doctors. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that when people offer opinions on extremely consequential issues, like whether or not to go to war or whether or not to have welfare reform, or tax policy, trade policy, it’s not unreasonable to ask what are their predictive track records in the past as a guide for how much credibility to attach to what they’re saying in the present.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: It does seem a little more important than whether or not to take an umbrella.

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, that’s important too. [LAUGHTER]

A while back, Brendan Nyhan noticed that I was working to document pundit predictions and pointed me to James Fallows’ book Breaking the News. Here’s the relevant passage:

Weeks before an important Senate confirmation vote, months before a congressional election, years before the presidential primaries begin, the most influential figures in journalism spend their time predicting what is going to happen. When the results come in, attention shifts almost immediately to what it all means for the next tests of political strength. The process is like the acceleration of TV advertisement, in which Christmas shopping ads appear just after Halloween. The big difference between political handicappers and those who set the point spread in sports is that in politics there is no payoff day. For pundits there is no financial or professional penalty for being consistently wrong. There can be rewards for being spectacularly right.
. . .

“These campaign-coverage jobs are the sexiest jobs in journalism,” says a newsmagazine reporter who has covered presidential campaigns. “They pay better. You get more space. The culture rewards you. And they are by far the easiest stories to write. They are the easiest because you cannot get it wrong! It’s all just contending theories about who has a better take on what is up and down, and when it’s over no one goes back to check.”

Bookies would be envious.

Well, now Lying in Ponds will be going back to check. Since July, I’ve been trying to document any predictions made by our twenty pundits. There are six so far, shown in the sidebar to the right. So far, none of the predictions can be shown to be true or false, but “payoff day” will come sooner or later. Long time readers may remember when Thomas Oliphant made an unfortunate prediction which was proven false in less than a day.

Last week I noted that Mark Steyn’s columns had been perfectly negative toward Democrats, in that he had not made a single positive Democratic reference in the several months he’s been on the roster. So naturally his next column contained several positive references to Joe Lieberman and his recent pro-Iraq War column.

For another example of partisan perfection, take a look at Joe Conason’s columns this entire year. He has made only five individual negative Democratic references in his 42 columns, and all of them have been generic: Democrats, Democrats, Democratic President, Democrat, Democratic. In other words, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to criticize a single Democrat by name all year, not even Joe Lieberman.

I don’t really write very often about Joe Conason here — I guess it’s because I can’t think of much to say. Paul Krugman is a substantive (but incredibly partisan) commentator, but Mr. Conason’s writing is Democratic conventional wisdom, utterly predictable and utterly boring.

It seems that I’ve been found by a kindred spirit:

A possible recruit?

I’ve only glanced over his blog, but I suspect this guy could be a potential recruit for the Unparty. What do y’all think?

I mean, aside from the nice allusion in the blog’s name to Michael Palin’s wonderful rant on the proper basis for wielding “supreme executive power (search at the link for ‘ponds’),” this guy’s way of expressing his philosophy is in places eerily similar to my own. I really started when I saw the phrase, “American journalism has been damaged by worshiping at the altar of objectivity.” Yeah, I know he’s paraphrasing someone else, but I’ve been talking about the fact that worship of the “false god Objectivity” is a barrier in the search for journalistic truth for years (oddly, though I’ve said it hundreds of times, I can’t find a single instance where I wrote it; I must be searching wrong). It’s the reason I made the leap from news to editorial — you don’t get to tell the truth in news.

What do I mean by that? Probably not what you think I mean. What I do mean is that news people try to be objective, which means leaving out the subjective (or trying to “balance” it with subjective quotes that pull 180 degree in the other direction). The problem is, a significant portion of truth is subjective, and if you leave it out, the little rump “objective” remnant is a distortion, often bearing little resemblance to the truth.

If you are honest, you will say subjective things. To aspire to absolute objectivity is to lie by omission.

Anyway, I like his distinction between being nonpartisan and being “objective.” Although I’m bothered by the fact that he finds “party preference” acceptable, I suppose he’d be welcome to join us — seeing as how to reject him would be to enforce “fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets,” and we don’t hold with that.

The writer is Brad Warthen, the editorial page editor of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper. Now it’s true that native North Carolinians tend to look askance at South Carolina in general, but my home state is Texas or Illinois or the state of confusion. The Unparty sounds pretty good to me; I’ll be keeping an eye on Mr. Warthen’s blog from now on.

Bob Somerby’s website The Daily Howler was one of the very first links on Lying in Ponds when it started in 2002, and I’ve praised him and criticized him quite a bit over the years. I keep reading because, regardless of how much I may disagree with him on particular issues, I am always impressed by his passion for facts and logic. Lately he’s been writing some sharp commentary on education:

When we start our new web site in the new year, we’ll try to suggest things that might work in our low-achieving minority schools. But it was silly when Kaiser made his simple comparison of US schools to those of Finland, and we can think of no reason to assume that those Japanese teacher-development strategies in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods (yawn) will produce any real results inside our most challenged schools.

I have no special background or professional interest in education, but watching my own three kids go through the public schools has made me wish that I had time to really study these issues. If you’re interested, keep an eye on what Mr. Somerby is doing.

Mark Steyn continues to lead Republican pundits in partisanship this year — he has still not made a single positive Democratic reference (against 139 negative references) in his 22 columns since being added to the roster in July. It’s a relatively small sample, but it seems obvious that Mr. Steyn is an extremely partisan columnist. For comparison, Ann Coulter also has had no positive Democratic references over the same period, but her overall score is lower because of her increasing criticism of Republicans this year.

Sorry for the lack of posts and getting behind on columns; I’ve been traveling this week in Chicago and Albany, NY. Back to normal next week.

Betsy Newmark likes Richard Cohen’s take on Ted Stevens and Congressional pork:

Richard Cohen is smack on correct today as he ridicules Ted Stevens high-flown language defending his pork for Alaska and Stevens’ threats to resign if the Senate voted on the Coburn bill to take the money for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and spend it on Katrina relief. Stevens is a pompous windbag up there with Robert Byrd (whom he replaced as President Pro Tem of the Senate - there is a depressing thought). But Cohen is also correct that the Democrats missed a great opportunity to score points against Bush who had signed the pork-filled transportation bill. In this case, the senators’ desire for pork outweighed the partisan points they could have scored. And that is a bipartisan shame.

Many have linked to a lengthy, interesting profile of Maureen Dowd by Ariel Levy in New York magazine. Here’s a bit about her role in the partisan wars:

“I put Barbara’s comment in my book because I know it isn’t the same for everyone,” says Dowd. “I was just saying how it felt for me.” Dowd is not a partisan. She was as merciless with Clinton as she was with Bush, and she is as skeptical of feminism as she is of communism. As Wieseltier puts it, “She insists that the human logic of events is their primary logic. She’s never distracted by the political or economic explanation.”

Dowd is assumed by most people to be a Democrat. But a certain brand of lefty will never forgive her for her coverage of the Clinton impeachment, the work that won her a Pulitzer. “A lot of people thought, Well, Maureen Dowd should be a liberal columnist and sticking up for our side,” says Mike McCurry. “They thought that she was aiding and abetting Ken Starr and the Republican hate machine, and in reality she was part of this kind of Irish-Catholic mafia that included Chris Matthews and Mike Kelly that thought Clinton’s sins were beyond the pale.”

I agree that Ms. Dowd is not extremely partisan — though her partisanship score is very high this year, she has clearly demonstrated a willingness to sharply criticize both parties.

Her mom, like the rest of the Dowd family, was thoroughly Republican. “Oh, God,” says Dowd’s sister, also named Peggy. “Crimson.” They rarely discuss politics. “There are times when her columns get to me, but then I gotta think, you know, at the end of my life, George Bush is not going to be knocking on my door,” says Peggy Dowd. “It doesn’t matter how much money I send him or how many times I vote for him, if I’m in the hospital, he won’t come and hold my hand, and I know Maureen will.”

Along the same lines, remember when Ms. Dowd devoted an entire column to her Republican brother’s views?

UPDATE (11/10): More on Dowd from Howard Kurtz and Eileen McNamara, both via Romensko.

Romenesko pointed to a column by Eric Deggans in the St. Petersburg Times, which gives some helpful background on the Brown/Allbaugh roommate error.