March 2003 Archive

In the past few days, pundits Andrew Sullivan and Ann Coulter have pioneered a disingenuous attack on the media, suggesting that any reporting that is skeptical about or critical of American conduct or progress in the war in Iraq amounts to support for Saddam Hussein.

While Coulter and Sullivan focus on different targets (the New York Times and the British Broadcasting Company, respectively), their arguments are strikingly similar. Both invent dark pro-Saddam motivations and absurdly ascribe them to entire media institutions - Sullivan goes so far as to suggest that the BBC is trying to "make the war more bloody" - based upon a series of suspect assertions and leaps of logic. It's fine to criticize media outlets for being unreasonably critical of the US in their news reporting, but to attack them as enemy sympathizers in wartime for such coverage is extremely inflammatory.

Motivation is not important. There is, however, a difference between the acts of critics and partisans and a reasonable metric should take that into account.

Administration critics, for example, may find a great deal to criticize about the administration. They may feel that those criticisms are more important than any mention of administration policies they agree with. It is more important, after all, to change dangerous policies than to applaud reasonable ones. A columnist who perceives a host of dangerous policies but spends time looking for reasonable policies to applaud in the name of balance might even be deemed irresponsible.

Partisans, however, combine criticism of one party with praise for the other. They aim not to change the policies of one party, but to promote the other as an alternative. They might, for example, attack the policies and positions of those who aren't in power while praising the policies of those in power in nearly equal measure, acts which have little bearing on actual policy directions (they merely applaud policies already in action and criticize policies that lacked political force) but which do attempt to increase the stature of those in power, exactly the type of act you're trying to identify when you decry the transformation of journalism into advertising.

I'll follow up with my own thoughts next week.

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When Lying in Ponds first got a little attention in May of last year, I received a very kind e-mail from Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity, in which he said this about their approach: ". . we try not to speculate as to people's intentions -- this is the hallmark of much of the jargon we criticize." I was very impressed by that (as I am by everything Spinsanity does), and have tried to follow his advice.

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I'm sure you spend lots of time thinking about the meaning of partisanship. The definition you use on your page describes it as adherence to a party or faction. I wonder, therefore, whether it is truly possible for someone to be a partisan without exhibiting such adherence. Extreme Libertarians, after all, might be highly critical of the Bush administration, but that wouldn't make them Democratic partisans.

I bring this up because I continue to find Krugman's ratings fascinating. He clearly despises the Bush administration and its policies, but it's difficult to see much preference in his columns for the Democratic alternative. Indeed, his 2003 score is based on 155 Republican references but only 3 Democratic ones, all from the same article, one a reference to Clinton that's hard to read as a comment on Clinton at all. In 13 of 14 articles, he mentions Democrats only in passing. That certainly qualifies him as a harsh administration critic, but it's hard to see how that qualifies him as an adherent.

To put it another way, if your point is to identify adherents, to identify those who turn journalism into advertising, a necessary factor would have to be approval of one party. It shouldn't be possible for someone to score more than 50% by writing solely about one party. It also shouldn't be possible for a few chance references to one party to have the same effect on an overall score as 150 references to the other.

To make the contrast clear, you say that Coulter moved into a near tie with Krugman. If you look at Coulter's numbers, however, you see that while she spends as much time bashing the Democrats as Krugman does the administration, she also devotes substantial portions of her columns to praising Republicans. That has to mean something.

SULLIVAN ON MCGRORY: Salon columnist Andrew Sullivan accuses (link requires registration or "day pass") columnist Mary McGrory of changing her mind on Iraq because she had "offended her loyal left-liberal readership":

This must be one of the most astonishing admissions by an opinion journalist in a very long time. She is not, she tells us, a free-thinker, trying to make sense of the world around her as best she can. She isn't a writer devoted to her own principles and applying them to the chaotic scene of world politics. She is a political hack with a constituency she has to please. Deviation from giving her "base" what it wants is "failure" in her journalism. It's useful, I guess, to see the real motives behind someone claiming to be a writer. But McGrory has just declared that she isn't a writer -- she is in fact the antithesis of one: an apparatchik, a phony and a propagandist.

The two McGrory columns referred to are I'm Persuaded and To My Very Persuasive Readers.

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The flip-flop is an embarrassment to Will and his reputation. Sadly, it may also be more than that as well. I fear that Will's adventure in hypocrisy is emblematic of what may well be the worst truth in American political discourse: nothing is shameful anymore. And no sense of integrity - an integrity that transcends politics - remains.

2002 Top Ten, Current Method
1	Paul Krugman	82
2	Collin Levey	57
3	Claudia Rosett	46
4	Robert L. Bartley	37
5	Michael Kelly	34
6	Mary McGrory	33
7	Daniel Henninger	30
8	Frank Rich	28
9	Michael Kinsley	24
10	Pete du Pont	24

2002 Top Ten, Proposed Method
1	Paul Krugman	76
2	Collin Levey	58
3	Claudia Rosett	53
4	Michael Kelly	38
5	Robert L. Bartley	37
6	Daniel Henninger	31
7	Mary McGrory	30
8	Pete du Pont	27
9	Charles Krauthammer	26
10	Thomas J. Bray	22

It generally lowers Democratic scores and raises Republican scores by a few points. The biggest change is that it drops Frank Rich's score by 15 points, lowering him from 8th place to 19th.

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Since it was first created by syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, the myth that the Bush administration "gave" $43 million to Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001 has circled the globe and circulated throughout the mainstream media in the US. Even after myriad attempts to correct the record, this pervasive bit of disinformation refuses to die.

As we have noted many times, President Bush granted $43 million in food aid and food security programs to relieve an impending famine in Afghanistan in May 2001, continuing an aid program initiated by President Clinton. The programs were administered directly by the United Nations and NGOs, bypassing the regime.

Scheer's June 2001 column, however, claimed that this constituted a "gift of $43 million" to the Taliban while never once mentioning the famine in the country or that the "gift" was food aid that bypassed the regime. Scheer's distortion has set off a series of echoes that shows no signs of fading.

On the outstanding Spinsanity topics page, Mr. Scheer has his own section, along with other Lying in Ponds columnists Ann Coulter, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Michael Kelly.

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To estimate that imbalance for 2002, I added up all of the party references (positive, negative and neutral) from all of the 37 pundits. With George W. Bush in the White House, the pundits mentioned Republicans more than Democrats by a 62/38 ratio. So if a columnist wrote about the parties in that same proportion, it wouldn't be fair to let their final score depend more heavily on their treatment of Republicans. To avoid that, I'm proposing that an adjustment of 12 percentage points should be added to each Democratic weight and subtracted from each Republican weight. The equation for PI would then be:

 PI = 100 * [(Df+Dadj)*DI - (Rf+Radj)*RI]
 

where DI and RI are the Democratic Index and Republican Index, and Df and Rf are each party's fraction of the total references:

           Dt                Rt
 Df =  --------- , Rf =  ---------
       (Dt + Rt)         (Dt + Rt)
 

Dadj and Radj are the adjustments necessary to correct the imbalance of references caused by the imbalance of political power. For 2002, Dadj would be +0.12 and Radj would be -0.12. If a columnist chooses to overemphasize one party or the other, then their scores will reflect that even after the adjustment. The table below shows the ratio of party references for each of the 2002 Top Ten pundits and their ratio after the 62/38 normalization is made.

	Columnist	R/D ratio	adjusted
1	Paul Krugman	86/14	74/26
2	Collin Levey	59/41	47/53
3	Claudia Rosett	71/29	59/41
4	Robert L. Bartley	60/40	48/52
5	Michael Kelly	51/49	39/61
6	Mary McGrory	61/39	49/51
7	Daniel Henninger	52/48	40/60
8	Frank Rich	68/32	56/44
9	Michael Kinsley	81/19	69/31
10	Pete du Pont	59/41	47/53

You can see that even after the adjustment, columnists like Paul Krugman would have scores which depend more heavily on their (negative) treatment of Republicans, while columnists like Michael Kelly would have scores which depend more heavily on their (negative) treatment of Democrats.

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