November 2002 Archive

With a clear, nonacademic writing style, Krugman appeals to many people who normally avoid economics like the plague -- even if they disagree with his political views. This year, Krugman used his high-profile Times forum and economic knowledge to skewer Bush-administration policies in columns with such titles as "The Bully's Pulpit" and "Crony Capitalism, USA." That made him a lightning rod read closely by both liberals and conservatives.

Thanks to reader "TVsHenry" for pointing me to the story.

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At a time when Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and other wingers seem to be the loudest voices around, those on the left are rallying around a Princeton professor who rarely sets foot inside the Beltway and isn't even a fulltime journalist.

Paul Krugman, in other words, is hot.

Hot not just because he commands a choice chunk of real estate on the New York Times op-ed page, but because week after week he bashes the Bush administration for lying and worse.

Kurtz links to a new article by Nicholas Confessore in the Washington Monthly, an excellent, balanced assessment of Mr. Krugman. Mr. Confessore gives him full credit for the accuracy of his criticism:

On balance, Krugman's record stands up pretty well. On the topics he writes about most often and most angrily--tax cuts, Social Security, and the budget--his record is nearly perfect. "The reason he's gotten under the White House's skin so much," says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, "is that he's right. None of it is rocket science."

The article also covers Mr. Krugman's mistakes this year and grapples with the views of many (including Lying in Ponds), that his credibility is hurt by his one-sided criticism of the Bush administration:

"He is obviously a very smart guy, basically liberal, with complicated views, who once recognized when his own side was wrong. And at some point he switched and became someone who only sees what's wrong with the other side, in fairly crude terms," says Mickey Kaus. "The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's good or bad for the country." True, Kaus is probably Krugman's most vociferous non-right-wing critic. But even among those journalists and politicos who enjoy his column, it's not uncommon to hear the comment that Krugman might be a little more effective if he were just a little less rabid.

Top Columnists by Yahoo Web Matches Columnist Web Matches 1. George Will 21600 2. Ann Coulter 18600 3. David Horowitz 16600 4. Cal Thomas 16400 5. Kathleen Parker 14300 6. Thomas Sowell 13700 7. Tony Snow 13300 8. Michael Kelly 13300 9. Linda Chavez 13000 10. Walter Williams 12800 11. Michelle Malkin 12600 12. Mona Charen 12500 13. Larry Elder 12200 14. John Leo 12100 15. Charles Krauthammer 12100 16. Don Feder 12000 17. Paul Greenberg 11600 18. Bill O'Reilly 11500 19. Suzanne Fields 11400 20. Robert Novak 10600

Why are the top twenty all conservative? Does this mean that conservative pundits are really that dominant in syndication? I'll investigate this further . .

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American versus British newspapers...

MediaMinded takes a look at the differences between American and British newspapers. One startling fact that you may not be aware of: Many British national newspapers top American papers in circulation--that in a country of about 58 million people. How can this be? I think one answer has to do with "bias." The British national newspapers are aligned with the various political factions in England. They make no pretence of objectivity. And, according to several landmark studies dating back to the 1950s, citizens find partisan information more politically useful than so-called objective information.

I recommend reading the entire Media Minded post, and following the links to interesting articles by Andrew Sullivan and the Columbia Journalism Review. Along the same lines, Eric Alterman argues in his book that American journalism would be well-served by following the British model of less boring, more ideological newspapers.

The Lying in Ponds take is that there is an important distinction which should be made between ideological bias and partisan bias. An ideological bias in the media is not a problem if it is openly acknowledged, and Mr. Alterman may be right that it would lead to more interesting newspapers and less political apathy in the public. But the presence of an excessive partisan bias transforms journalism into advertising, too distorted and unreliable to be useful in any serious political debate. I would invoke the Frank Rich/Paul Krugman ideology/partisanship example, but I'm sure everyone is tired of hearing me go on and on and on about that.

Andrew Cline has already responded to the above comment with more background on "the value of biased information".

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Ideally, I could find some list of the "top" pundits, defined in some rational way -- the most widely-read, widely-syndicated, most influential, etc. But I'm not aware of such a list, despite a fair amount of Googling. If anyone out there has any ideas, please let me know.

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The term "Floridization" and its variations is of the same breed as Clintonize", "Daschle-ize" and "Enronize": nonsensical catchphrases coined in order to attach loaded emotional associations to whatever they are applied to. In this case "Floridization" is an ad hominem attack on Democrats for legal wrangling and complaints about voting rights.

Such phrases become shorthand used to discredit the actions and policies of opponents without addressing them on the merits (Last and Fund do substantively address real issues, though they clearly coin the term so it will be used in this manner). The powerful connotations of such words often allows them to become deeply imbedded in political discourse, especially as they are repeated with less and less context. "Clintonize," for example, has become shorthand for everything one perceives to be wrong with American culture. Such terms erode the vocabulary of politics, diminishing the discourse to little more than a battle of buzzwords.

But Mr. Rich's opposition is clearly not partisan -- he shows no hesitation in criticizing Democrats with the same vigor. His independence was on display in his brutal post-election criticism of Democrats in Saturday's column. Following two other Republican-leaning columns, Mr. Rich dropped from 7th to 12th place. He was replaced in the Top Ten by Pete du Pont.

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The precinct is almost exactly split between the two parties, and the results here are usually well-correlated with the rest of the state. So when I saw that Dole had solidly won our precinct, it looked like it would be a Republican night.

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1. Mr. Krugman's Combined Partisanship Index of +28 (Democratic) in 2000 is dramatically less than this year's value of +83. This discrepancy suggests that it is not fair to consider Mr. Krugman the most partisan pundit in the rankings based on this year's data alone, because the scores may change significantly as the political landscape changes. This lends support to the common-sense "target-rich environment" hypothesis -- the idea that Democratic-leaning pundits will systematically have higher partisanship scores during Republican administrations and vice versa. Mr. Krugman's numbers for 2000 look fairly similar to those of someone like Charles Krauthammer this year -- probably quite partisan but somewhat muted by the absence of juicy, high-profile targets in the White House. Lying in Ponds suspects that a controversial president of the opposite party tends to elevate the true partisans to the top of the rankings ahead of their ideological brethren. Republican columnists like Robert Bartley, Michael Kelly, or Charles Krauthammer probably rose to Krugman-like heights in the rankings during the Clinton 90's.
2. Although Mr. Krugman's partisanship score was much lower, antipathy to Republicans is just as evident in his 2000 columns. In the course of 98 columns in 2000 and over 80 so far this year, there has been only one individual column which leaned in the Republican direction. It was a July 2000 column with one positive Republican reference, to the "Nixon-goes-to-China effect" (see how easy it is?).
3. The main reason for Mr. Krugman's lower partisanship score was that the award-winning international economist wrote many more columns in 2000 on non-political themes, mostly consisting of the sharp, well-written economic analysis for which he has become admired. His partisanship score is so high this year because his columns have been both remarkably one-sided and remarkably relentless. His 2000 columns were not quite as one-sided, and definitely not relentless. Below is a chart showing the orientation of his individual columns in each year.

   

4. The 2000 results do not support the idea that Mr. Krugman was critical of Bill Clinton or his administration -- references were about 23 positive to 4 negative. That's not very different than this year's 25 postive to 1 negative. Of course, it's quite possible that Mr. Krugman was more critical in the early Clinton years, before he started his Times column.

Thank you to whoever maintains the The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive; they have a complete up-to-date collection of Mr. Krugman's Times columns and much more.

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But lo and behold, The New York Times last week reported from Prague that President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm" the Atta-Iraqi meeting. Havel had "discreetly called Washington" to tell senior Bush officials to ignore the reports.

Wow -- Havel personally intervened, calling the Bush White House himself to "quietly, discreetly" contradict his intelligence service and fellow officials? That was a news story deserving its front-page play and subsequent editorial. My e-mail screen sparkled with gleeful nyah-nyahs from readers certain this proved Saddam had no terrorist connections and should be left alone. I brooded about my hunch.

But lo and re-behold, two days later The New York Times reported this denial from Havel's spokesman: "The president did not call the White House about this. The president never spoke with any American government official about Atta, not with Bush, not with anyone else."