July 2003 Archive

George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics, demonstrates that liberals and conservatives understand politics in terms of two different metaphors of the family. He is co-author with Mark Johnson of the landmark work on metaphor entitled Metaphors We Live By, in which they state:

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."

What this means is: We understand non-literal concepts, such as "politics," in terms of metaphor. The predominant metaphor of politics and government in our culture is: Government is a family. Liberals and conservatives have two different views of family and what is moral in terms of family dynamics, i.e. generally speaking, liberals operate with a nurturing parent metaphor and conservatives operate with a strict-father metaphor. This means that liberals and conservatives quite naturally see each other as failing morally.

And this difference in metaphor explains apparent political contradictions. For example, how can a conservative be pro-life and pro-death penalty? To the conservative, operating with a strict-father metaphor, this is no contradiction at all. The convict, having failed as a citizen, deserves punishment, even death, to protect the moral values of society. The unborn are totally innocent of any moral failing (until birth) and deserve protection.

It's a commonplace of the Enlightenment that civic men should be able to discuss the issues of the day with mutual respect for honest differences of opinion. But, liberals and conservatives have two distinctly different moral systems. Each sees its own as naturally moral. This makes reaching such an ideal quite difficult--but not impossible. In our era, however, it is made all the more difficult by people such as Ann Coulter (right and left) who profit at the expense of civil, civic debate.

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

So what do we do with the current Lying in Ponds partisanship leader, Ann Coulter? Ms. Coulter clearly thinks that liberals are evil, charging them with the crime of treason in her latest book. I think a better theory is that many liberals and conservatives make the same (human) mistake -- they find it easier to believe that their political opponents are lacking in intelligence or morality than to come to grips with the existence of millions of smart, well-intentioned people who sincerely hold very different political opinions from their own.

[permanent link]

Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper hand. Conservatives think this is ludicrous. We may have Rush and Fox, conservatives say, but you have ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times. But liberals are sincere. They despair that a consortium of conservative think tanks, talk radio hosts, and Fox News--Hillary's vast right-wing conspiracy--has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.

Coming conveniently after a recent debate between Hoystory and Tapped over whether columnists for the Times or The Wall Street Journal is more one-sided ideologically, the addition of a second conservative columnist would seem to settle the question in favor of Tapped and the Times.

The position of Lying in Ponds is that newspapers are free to be ideologically unbalanced in their choice of columnists, but that newspapers which seek to serve a broad audience should offer their readers a range of intelligent commentary. The New York Times has taken an important step in that direction; when will The Wall Street Journal expand the very narrow ideological range of their columnists? Robert Bartley of the Journal seems to imply that it won't happen soon.

[permanent link]

Now it is unquestionably the case that a general media outlet can render itself highly partisan merely by its selection of stories. For example, assuming that the Presidential trip to Africa is objectively more newsworthy than the simultaneous "he lied" meme, a general media outlet could show partisanship by electing to devote massive coverage to the "he lied" meme - but little to the simultaneous Presidential trip to Africa.

But I have a big problem labeling a columnist "partisan" solely on the basis of topic selection - even where that selection is motivated by subjective partisan motives. One does not read Paul Krugman to find "all the news that fit to print" - or commentary on "all the topics that are fit for an academic economist to write about."

My difficulties with Herr Doktorprofessor stem largely from his reliance on (1) a constant stream of bad economics, including incomplete economics, (2) false, misleading and materially incomplete statements of fact and economic theory, (3) evasive language often intended to allow him to claim credit for predictions where none were made, and (4) a boring parroting of the then-current liberal Democratic line that he attempts to tart up as original commentary.

I still enjoy reading LIP -- but I don't see how LIP's criteria pick up much of what bothers me about Herr Doktorprofessor. Perhaps I'm wrong.

It's not a bug, it's a feature! The methodology used here is an attempt to quantify only partisanship, and is not intended as a more general guide to the quality of a columnist. There are many other important traits such as accuracy, relevance, fairness, civility and style, but Lying in Ponds makes no attempt to measure them. I highly recommend other websites such as Spinsanity and Rhetorica, which grapple courageously with some of those important issues.

I'm not sure that I understand why partisanship shouldn't be inferred when a columnist chooses to write about only topics which tend to favor their own party or disfavor the other. A columnist could choose topics with partisan intent, and write with scrupulous accuracy about those carefully-limited subjects. But wouldn't the end result of such selectivity be a parade of partisan half-truths?

[permanent link]

NOT ALWAYS OBVIOUS: Weblogger Ed Cone says of Lying in Ponds: "Interesting stuff, although even without the complex methodology I had figured out that 'Ms. Ivins shows all the signs of being a very partisan columnist' and placed Ann Coulter at the top of the partisan charts." I agree that some of the top pundits are not unexpected, but some of the leaders have been a surprise to me (Collin Levey and Claudia Rosett last year). I also hear from readers who are horrified that their own favorite villain is not ranked highly. When you actually evaluate every column, you find that frequently-disliked columnists such as Maureen Dowd and George Will actually write quite a few nuanced columns and can sometimes go strongly the other way.

[permanent link]

A few thoughts and clarifications:

1. Lying in Ponds believes that while newspapers are certainly free to be ideologically unbalanced in their choice of columnists, both the NYT and WSJ have stated policies of independent commentary, which I interpret to mean that their columnists should not be excessively partisan, regardless of where they are ideologically. Lying in Ponds has argued for a critical distinction between an ideological-but-not-partisan pundit like Frank Rich and the excessively partisan Paul Krugman.
2. I was reluctant to try to compare the NYT and WSJ because of the fact that I evaluated only the OpinionJournal.com columnists -- Al Hunt's columns are usually available only on the main WSJ website, which requires a paid subscription. Because of that quirk, noted by both Tapped and Mr. Hoy, I can't really compare the full sets of columnists properly. Having said that, I think that both newspapers can be legitimately criticized for partisanship. For the New York Times, Paul Krugman's partisanship is extreme and unmatched by any other pundit at the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. But I believe that other NYT columnists are unfairly criticized as partisan. Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert and especially Nicholas D. Kristof each had lower partisanship scores last year than Collin Levey, Claudia Rosett, Robert L. Bartley, Daniel Henninger, Pete du Pont, Thomas J. Bray, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Brendan Miniter from the WSJ.
3. Tapped quoted my year-end statement that the WSJ OpinionJournal had six columnists in the 2002 Top Ten, but that was my mistake. The number fluctuated between five and six all year but it ended up at five. I've now corrected that page -- sorry about that.

The Democrats' jejune claim that Saddam Hussein is not a threat to our security presupposes they would care if he were. Who are they kidding? Democrats adore threats to the United States. Bush got a raucous standing ovation at his State of the Union address when he announced that "this year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles." The excitement was noticeably muted on the Democrats' side of the aisle. The vast majority of Democrats remained firmly in their seats, sullen at the thought that America would be protected from incoming ballistic missiles. To paraphrase George Bush: If this is not treason, then treason has no meaning.

If there was an additional category in the scoring system for rabidly negative, paragraphs like the one above might make Ms. Coulter invincible in our partisanship rankings.

[permanent link]

Ann Coulter is a lawyer and author of the New York Times best seller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. Her most recent book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right , is a number one New York Times Best-Seller.

Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, Hannity and Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, American Morning With Paula Zahn, Crossfire, ABC's "This Week", Good Morning America, the Leeza Show, and has been profiled in TV Guide, National Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and George Magazine. She was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.
. . .
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

Like Robert Scheer, Ann Coulter has been criticized so often by the non-partisan analysts at Spinsanity that she has been given her own section on the Spinsanity topics page. Brendan Nyhan dissected Ms. Coulter's techniques in a 2001 article titled "The Jargon Vanguard". More recently, the publication of her book "Treason" has generated a round of denunciations from across the political spectrum. Lying in Ponds pundits Richard Cohen and Dorothy Rabinowitz have both weighed in, and Mr. Nyhan has summarized Ms. Coulter this way:

With her new book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, syndicated pundit Ann Coulter has driven the national discourse to a new low. No longer content to merely smear liberals and the media with sweeping generalizations and fraudulent evidence, she has now upped the ante, accusing the entire Democratic Party as well as liberals and leftists nationwide of treason, a crime of disloyalty against the United States. But, as in her syndicated columns (many of which are adapted in the book) and her previous book Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right, Coulter's case relies in large part on irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions. Regardless of your opinions about Democrats, liberals or the left, her work should not be taken at face value.

So does Ms. Coulter use "irrational rhetoric" in the service of excessive partisanship, or does her high partisanship score merely reflect a consistent conservative ideology? Despite the general caveat about jumping to conclusions after only six months of columns, I can't see any explanation for Ms. Coulter's one-sided columns other than partisanship. Her leading score is based on a ratio of 14-1 negative to positive Democratic references and a 10-1 ratio of positive to negative Republican references, leaving no doubt about how she feels about both parties. Ms. Coulter continually makes blanket attacks on "Democrats", using the word negatively 53 times in 29 columns. Her score would be even higher if not for the fact that she substitutes the word "liberals" an additional 120 times, far more than any of our other pundits (Mona Charen is second with only 27 "liberals"). Ideologues often criticize their own party for insufficient purity, but Ms. Coulter's negative references to Republicans are mild and rare. Unlike Robert Scheer or Peggy Noonan, Ms. Coulter's columns have covered a range of topics, but nearly every column becomes a partisan screed regardless of the subject matter.

With a controversial Republican administration and Republican control of both houses of Congress, it seems likely that Democratic partisans would be energized by opportunities for criticism, perhaps systematically increasing their partisanship scores. Defying that expectation, Republican pundit Ann Coulter has seized the lead in the 2003 Lying in Ponds partisanship rankings through a series of rants which attempt to convince the reader that the political world is very simple to understand -- all liberals are bad, all Democrats are bad, and all Republicans are good.

[permanent link]

SIX MONTH REVIEW -- ROBERT SCHEER: Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, new to Lying in Ponds this year, has the second-highest partisanship score through the first six months of 2003. From his biography:

Robert Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.
. . .

An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books, including "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power"; "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War" and "America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals."

Over the years, Scheer has been honored for his work, including his coverage of the underprivileged and the welfare system. Recently, he was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego and Yale University.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Robert Scheer has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the few pundits to have a section devoted to them on Spinsanity's handy topics page. Spinsanity has been unsparing in their criticism of Mr. Scheer, as in this 2001 piece by Ben Fritz:

At a time when all too many pundits engage in their share of lies, spin, and jargon, Robert Scheer stands out in a class by himself. In column after column, his favored tactics have been irrational criticism, distortion, and spin. At his worst, Scheer's false tropes spread and become part of the commonly accepted discourse. Since September 11, for instance, as Dan Kennedy noted in the Boston Phoenix , the Taliban aid trope has been repeated in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Denver Post and Salon. For those concerned about the rise of irrational discourse in American politics, Robert Scheer stands out as one of the worst offenders.

Lying in Ponds agrees with Spinsanity that Mr. Scheer has practiced "irrational discourse", but that doesn't necessarily make him guilty of partisanship. Mr. Scheer's high partisanship score results from his unrelenting criticism of the Bush administration this year; his 14-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references includes contemplation of impeachment in five different columns. Despite that, I believe that there are good reasons to reserve judgment about whether Mr. Scheer's one-sided commentary should be considered to be evidence of excessive partisanship:

• As I said in the Peggy Noonan review earlier this week, six months of columns is not a large enough dataset. Like Ms. Noonan, Mr. Scheer's writing this year has been almost entirely concerned with issues surrounding the war in Iraq. As a staunch opponent of the war, Mr. Scheer's high ranking may be misleading, because it doesn't reflect his views on the wider range of subjects which would naturally arise over the period of a year or longer.
• Robert Scheer has been by far the most "asymmetric" pundit in the rankings, a term I've used to mean that he has a large imbalance in references to the two parties. He has hardly mentioned Democrats this year, only about one time for every 20 times he mentions Republicans. I had a dialogue with a reader earlier this year about whether it's appropriate that the methodology allows a pundit to achieve a high partisanship score by criticizing one party without at the same time approving the other. I believe that it is appropriate, but I'm open to being persuaded otherwise. Again, a longer period of record should help clarify Mr. Scheer's treatment of the Democratic party.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the "new trade theory," a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." Krugman's current academic research is focused on economic and currency crises.

Paul Krugman easily topped last year's partisanship rankings, but he has dropped into third place so far this year, behind two columnists who are new to Lying in Ponds. Because of his high scores, Mr. Krugman has at times dominated the discussion here, and he continues to be a hero to the left and a lightning rod for criticism from the right. It would be a full-time job just to keep up with the missiles flying between the "Krugman Truth Squad" and Donald Luskin on one side, and Bobby Pelgrift's Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive and Mr. Krugman's own website on the other. Because of heightened reader interest in Mr. Krugman, we have a very large body of his columns to examine -- all of them written for the Times in 2000, 2002 and 2003.

Over these two and a half years of columns, Paul Krugman's commentary has been one-sided to an extraordinary degree. It is simply astounding that not a single one of his 243 columns has been devoted mainly to criticism of Democrats or praise of Republicans. At first, Mr. Krugman wrote many witty, thought-provoking and completely apolitical columns about economics, but they have dwindled as the frequency of partisan screeds has increased. In 2000, 53 of his 98 columns contained no party references, but in 2002, only 8 of 99 did, and so far this year only one lonely column of 46 was non-political. Although Mr. Krugman himself has explicitly denied the charge of partisanship, the data doesn't seem to support any of the proposed explanations for his one-sided punditry:

• Krugman is simply being critical of the party in power -- Although Mr. Krugman's early criticism of the Clinton administration is often cited, there is little evidence of such independence in recent years. In his 2000 columns, he made over 140 negative references to George W. Bush, but only 13 to Al Gore and a grand total of 3 to Bill Clinton, who served as a high government official at the time.
• Being hostile to Bush policies isn't the same as being a Democratic partisan -- Although he has called Democrats "hapless" and "ineffectual" on his website, Mr. Krugman has praised them consistently in the Times, with positive references exceeding negative references by a 3-1 ratio in 2000, 4-1 in 2002 and increasing to 5-1 this year.
• Krugman writes about economics, and he happens to disagree with Republicans on economic policy -- Mr. Krugman wrote many columns on non-economic topics in 2002, but they're just as partisan as the economics columns. There was an anti-Republican screed on the church and state issue, an anti-Republican screed on Trent Lott, an anti-Republican screed on climate policy, an anti-Republican screed on forest policy, an anti-Republican screed on drilling in Alaska, an anti-Republican screed on French elections (huh?), and many more.

All of this is made much more disappointing by the fact that Mr. Krugman's intelligence and credentials as an award-winning economist are sorely needed in the national debate. For those of us who know next to nothing about economics, a thoughtful opinion from someone with Mr. Krugman's background would be invaluable, but after slogging my way through 243 columns without a single substantive deviation from the party line, how could I expect to learn something about which party's position is better on any issue, when I already know what his answer will be?

[permanent link]

Molly Ivins is from Houston, has a B.A. from Smith College, a Master's in journalism from Columbia University and studied for a year at the Institute of Political Science in Paris. She began her career in journalism as the Complaint Department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, from whence she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings.

. . .

She speaks both French and Spanish, loves to camp, canoe and run rivers and is a semi-famous storyteller and beer-drinker.

She is author of two best-selling books, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, both collections of essays on politics and journalism. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times and was the winner of the 1992 Headliners Award for best column in Texas.

However, Ivins counts as her two greatest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.

As I said in yesterday's review of Peggy Noonan, one should be very cautious about drawing firm conclusions from only six months of columns. But so far, Ms. Ivins shows all the signs of being a very partisan columnist. Her ratio of 6-1 positive to negative Democratic references and 7-1 negative to positive Republican references are quite one-sided. She criticized Republicans in 45 of her 50 columns -- the one column which received a contrary score had only a single offhand positive reference to Governor Jane Hull of Arizona.

One partisan signature is the inability to resist digs at political opponents even in columns on non-political topics. Perhaps it doesn't rise to the level of the Partisan Non Sequitur Hall of Fame, but Ms. Ivins found a way to take shots at both President Bush and Kenneth Starr in her July 4th column on "the sheer improbable bliss of life in a free country". Another revealing trait is the tendency to rush to criticism of political opponents based on premature or otherwise questionable information. Ms. Ivins nominated Donald Rumsfeld for a "What Were They Thinking?" title over the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. Although the looting story is now believed to have been greatly exaggerated, Ms. Ivins has not yet offered any sort of correction, as far as I know.

[permanent link]

Peggy Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. She is also a contributing editor of Time magazine and Good Housekeeping, a member of the board of the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, "When Character Was King" (Viking Penguin 2001). Ms. Noonan was special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. In 1988 she was chief speechwriter for Vice President George Bush as he ran for the presidency. Her first book, "What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era," was published in 1990. She is also author of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" (1994), "On Speaking Well" (1998), and "The Case Against Hillary Clinton" (2000).

Before entering the Reagan White House, she was a producer at CBS News in New York, where she wrote and produced Dan Rather's daily radio commentary. She also wrote television news specials for CBS News. In 1978 and 1979 she was an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. Ms. Noonan lives in New York.

After six months, Ms. Noonan had the fifth-highest partisanship score of the 32 pundits who are being evaluated. More than any other columnist, Ms. Noonan's high score comes from lavish praise of those in her own party, often in the form of extravagant tributes like this one to President Bush from her January 30 column:

This, truly, is a good man. And that is a rare thing. Agree with Mr. Bush's stands or disagree, there can be no doubting the depth of his seriousness and the degree to which he attempts to do what he is convinced is right, and to lead his country toward that vision of rightness. We have had many unusual men as president and some seemed like a gift and some didn't. Mr. Bush seems uniquely resolved to be as courageous as the times require and as helpful as they allow. There is a profound authenticity to him, and a fearlessness too.

A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift.

But I think that Ms. Noonan's record this year shows the danger of trying to draw firm conclusions from only six months of columns. Last year, Peggy Noonan was also ranked very highly early in the year. But then she wrote many non-political and other nuanced columns, wrote a tribute to Paul Wellstone, and then ended the year criticizing Trent Lott over her final three columns. She finished 2002 far down in the rankings, and based on the complete Lying in Ponds record of 18 months of columns, I have no hesitation in concluding that Ms. Noonan is not really very partisan. Her strong support of the war in Iraq has dominated her writing so far this year, but I expect that her partisanship score will drop when she eventually turns to a wider range of subjects.

[permanent link]

Mr. Henninger was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and he won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary in 1985. In 1998 he received the Scripps Howard Foundation's Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, for editorials on a range of issues, including the International Monetary Fund, presidential politics and cloning. He had been a finalist for the Walker Stone Award in 1993--primarily for his editorial "No Guardrails," about the decline of self-restraint in American society--and in 1987, for editorials that helped inspire changes in the Food and Drug Administration's drug-approval procedures. He won the 1995 American Society of Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing, and he was a finalist in that award in 1985, 1986 and 1993.

A native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree from the School of Foreign Service. He began his journalism career at The New Republic magazine. He and his wife, Mary, have three children and live in Ridgewood, N.J.

So far this year, Mr. Henninger is one of the rare pundits who praises his own party more than he criticizes the other, about twice as often. He notes in his column of January 3:

Looking over the past year's columns, I'm struck at how much praise I've given George W. Bush. Ideological affinity aside, what's so special?

Accordingly, Mr. Henninger's most common positive Republican references this year are to Bush(13), George W. Bush(7), President Bush(5), and George Bush(4). Is this worshipful treatment of the president just honest "ideological affinity", or is it partisanship? Once again, I look to see whether a pundit is able to occasionally write an entire column which goes the other way, acknowledging that their political allies make serious mistakes or that their opponents get it right once in a while. But Mr. Henninger hasn't produced a column scolding Republicans over steel tariffs or Enron or Trent Lott. He hasn't written a column praising Patrick Moynihan or any other Democrat, just a few scattered, offhand, weakly positive references.

Like Michael Kinsley, Daniel Henninger is smart and articulate; he has written poignantly about September 11 and other topics. He doesn't degrade the political discourse with ugly, extreme partisan rhetoric. But at his worst (see these two post-election columns last year -- here and here), his sweeping generalizations about the Democratic Party and careful avoidance of Republican faults amounts to polite, well-written partisan propaganda.

WOULDN'T YOU KNOW: Only one day after I wrote a review of Michael Kinsley in which I chided him for one-sided commentary, he writes his first contrarian column of the year. In today's thoughtful and nuanced column on medical malpractice reform, he criticizes Democrats and praises Republicans often enough to drop one position in the rankings, behind Daniel Henninger.

[permanent link]

He was ideologically anti-ideological. He had an unerring eye for cant, hypocrisy and sanctimony. He was hysterically funny and, perhaps most important, politically fearless. Kinsley turned sacred cows into hamburger without regard for political or ideological affinity.

It's difficult to reconcile that portrayal with Mr. Kinsley's last 18 months of columns. His writing is definitely intelligent, creative and funny -- I greatly enjoy reading him. He can take strong positions without resorting to ad hominem attacks, manipulative rhetoric, etc. He is unlikely to suffer the ignominy of getting his own section on Spinsanity's Topics page.

But a glance through the lists of columns from this year and last year reveals very little political fearlessness. This year's ratio of 28 negative references to the other party for each negative reference to his own approaches Coulter/Scheer/Krugman territory. It looks a lot like predictable partisan criticism -- only Republican cows are being turned into hamburger. Another reason that Mr. Kinsley's ranking is so high is that he has written very few non-political columns this year.

A common rationale for such one-sided criticism is that the pundit is simply holding accountable the party which happens to be in power. That explanation is difficult to accept in the case of Mr. Kinsley, who spends much more time criticizing Republicans not in power (at least 30 total negative references, mostly to Bill Bennett, but also to George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Richard Nixon) than to Democrats which are (only 2 negative references, one each to Joe Lieberman and to Democrats in general). Michael Kinsley can be a valuable voice of reason in the national debate; I'm hoping for less partisanship and more political fearlessness.

[permanent link]

She launched her syndicated column in 1987 and it has become one of the fastest growing columns in the industry. It is featured in more than 200 papers, including the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Washington Times. She spent 6 years as a regular commentator on CNN's "Capital Gang" and "Capital Gang Sunday," and has served as a judge of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Ms. Charen is a frequent guest on television and radio public affairs programs and is married with three children.

Ms. Charen has about a 9 to 1 ratio of negative to positive Democratic references, and a 4 to 1 ratio of positive to negative Republican references, quite comparable to Brendan Miniter. Like Mary McGrory, despite hostility to the other party, she has shown an ability to occasionally devote an entire column criticizing her own party, writing columns accusing the Bush administration of "dropping the ball on homeland security" and of "being led into a hornet's nest" by "Saudi tendrils". Like many pundits, her score is also moderated by fairly frequent non-partisan columns on personal, cultural or international issues.

WINDOWS? I thought so. When I evaluated Thomas Sowell's column this morning, I thought the title was strange. It was titled 'Saving' Bay Windows, but it was about a development controversy over an old racetrack in California called Bay Meadows. Now I notice this evening that the title has been changed to 'Saving' Bay Meadows -- that makes me feel better.

[permanent link]

A fundamental goal of Lying in Ponds has been to discern the difference between strong party preference based on honest ideological belief, and one-sided commentary originating instead from mindless partisanship. I believe that these partisanship rankings can help to make such distinctions (imperfectly, of course) by revealing important patterns through analysis of a sufficiently large set of columns. After evaluating over a year of Ms. McGrory's columns, my conclusion is that her relatively high Democratic partisanship score is a result of sincere ideology. The primary evidence is that despite a lot of Bush-bashing, Ms. McGrory does two things very rarely done by those at the top of the rankings. In the past two years, she has: (1) frequently praised those seen as moderate Republicans (Colin Powell, John McCain, Elliot Richardson); and (2) occasionally leveled harsh criticism at her own party, most notably last year after the congressional authorization of force in Iraq and after the November mid-term elections. While a true partisan tends to simply avoid any evidence which contradicts their good party/bad party thesis, I believe that Ms. McGrory is an honest liberal who praises Republicans when they move toward the center and criticizes Democrats when they do the same.

[permanent link]

Brendan Miniter was in tenth place after six months (his score has since dropped after a couple of non-partisan columns); in 2002 he was in sixth place at the halfway mark and finished as the 12th most partisan pundit. From Mr. Miniter's biography:

Brendan Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column, "The Western Front," appears Tuesdays. Before joining the Journal in September 2000, he edited the Forum section of the Commentary pages for the Washington Times. While there he started a weekly feature on the editorial page, "Nobles and Knaves," which spotlighted often-unknown individuals behind major events. Earlier, he was a reporter for the Northern Virginia Daily in Front Royal and has edited publications for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Mr. Miniter enjoys fly-fishing and holds a B.A. in history from George Mason University.

Brendan Miniter's relatively high ranking comes mostly from a 9 to 1 ratio of negative to positive Democratic references. In 2002 he did a lot of Clinton-bashing; this year his most frequent targets have been presidential candidate Bob Graham (two successive "Is Graham Crackers?" columns), Virginia governor Mark Warner and Senator Charles Schumer. As expected for a WSJ OpinionJournal columnist, Mr. Miniter is highly supportive of the Bush administration, but unlike the titans of partisanship at the top of the rankings, he can occasionally go the other way -- he wrote a column at the beginning of the year which harshly criticized New York governor George Pataki.

[permanent link]