May 2003 Archive

European governments: Let starving Africans eat Cal Thomas

An outrageous new falsehood is circulating about President Bush. Last week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is "not a problem anymore," and the distorted quotation has since been repeated by MSNBC "Buchanan and Press" co-host Bill Press, CNN's Miles O'Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a time when the New York Times is under fire for its conduct in the Jayson Blair scandal, Dowd's creation of an exploding media myth is cause for serious concern.

Coincidentally, Mr. Nyhan just received an award for earlier efforts to debunk another well-traveled myth, that "the National Educational Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on al-Qaida". These two stories, among dozens of others, show why Spinsanity is so indispensable.

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Columnist Robert Scheer's columns about Iraq all started to sound the same after a while, so I did an exhaustive analysis of his columns from the first few months of the year, and confirmed that they simply recycle through the same old canards. It's almost as if Scheer has a machine that spits out random combinations of canards each week. The table shows which canards were used in which day's column. . .

Pundits and politicians have been leveraging the powerful emotional associations of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other such figures since soon after September 11. Such cheap, irrational attacks, most of which link domestic political opponents with hated enemies, serve only to undermine rational debate.

The New York Times explicitly proclaims itself to be "an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, devoted to the public welfare without regard to . . the claims of party politics . .". Paul Krugman has explicitly rejected the notion that he is partisan. Yet in the 231 Krugman columns I've evaluated dating back to the Clinton administration, not a single one consists primarily of either substantive praise of Republicans or criticism of Democrats. I would argue that such a complete reduction of every issue to a simple partisan formula is not a minor flaw but a fundamental failure of the independent analysis to which the Times aspires. A truly independent analyst would likely tilt towards one party or the other for legitimate ideological reasons, but they would never be as predictable as Mr. Krugman. I really miss Frank Rich.

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Coulter's columns feel much more partisan than Krugman's because she is constantly making corrosive personal attacks as opposed to the substantive reporting and analysis that Krugman offers, delivered of course with a sharp partisan edge. Can you distinguish in your formula between substantive criticism by Krugman and personal criticism by Coulter? Also, Krugman does not offer much praise of the Democrats--which you note in other rankings, but not in the overall rankings. This must be factored in more in your rankings. For someone like me who does not agree with either party it makes absolutely no sense to rate Krugman as more partisan than Coulter when his columns are far and away more substantive. I cannot take your website seriously when I see something like that.

The first question keeps coming up -- I'm only trying to objectively measure partisanship, not making a much broader judgement on which columnists are the "best". I believe that a lack of excessive partisanship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good punditry. A columnist could be perfectly non-partisan, but uninformed, boring and worthless. In the opposite case, Mr. Peters clearly believes that "substantive reporting and analysis" is valuable, despite a "sharp partisan edge". I have some thoughts on that subject I'd like to post in the next day or two.

Mr. Peters second question is also an ongoing concern. My plan is to revise the methodology in the next month or so to try to correct for what I consider a bias against Democratic pundits in the rankings caused by Republican control of both the White House and Congress. Having said that, although Mr. Krugman's mention of Democrats is infrequent, he has been very favorable toward them (32 positive and only 4 negative Democratic references this year). That is taken into account in the overall rankings, and a change in methodology likely wouldn't improve his score very much.

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And while we're on the subject, I take some personal satisfaction in the fact that Krugman has slipped to the number two most partisan pundit of 2003 in the ratings on Lying in Ponds (that unusual name is drawn from a line in Holy Grail). Maybe our work here and on National Review Online really is reining Krugman in a bit. So perhaps a better cinematic allusion would actually be Get Shorty. Looks like we got him good.

Actually, Mr. Krugman's anti-Republican screed stream has continued unabated, but the addition of new pundits in 2003 includes at least two who have been able to crank out similarly predictable partisan commentary so far -- Robert Scheer and Ann Coulter.

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I hope to continue doing this for several years -- for one thing I'd love to see how the results change when there is a change of party in the White House. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the discussion, and to those who have encouraged me. Thank you also to the pundits themselves. Implicit in this project is the belief that independent commentary is a vital part of the political process; partisanship and other types of distortion are worth talking about because they make good political decision-making more difficult.

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