August 2003 Archive

That being said, Lying in Ponds completely out to lunch on Paul Krugman; Krugman devastated the whole "partisanship" argument ages ago, driving a stake deep into the heart of LiP's methology that it has never truly recovered from. LiP's supposedly "quantitative" measurement of partisanship is entirely robbed of context, rendering it utterly useless, as (as Krugman noted) a supposed "partisan" could be an honest critic of a dishonest target. Partisanship isn't necessary for this and, because of this, is entirely unprovable by LiP's methodology. As the entire point of the exercise is to measure partisanship, it's rendered pointless, useless, and highly deceptive.

In the comments to that post, Demosthenes carries on the discussion with Markus, who had previously offered his opinion about Lying in Ponds on his own Dormouse Dreaming weblog (scroll down). Demosthenes reiterates the point that "Bush is a natural target because he's the president, and LiP ignores that aspect of Krugman's critique of his methods . .". Since that hypothesis comes up so frequently, I thought it would be useful to delve into it -- we can try to remove Mr. Krugman's treatment of George W. Bush from the data and see how that would change his partisanship score.

I'll be looking only at the Total Partisanship Index, which makes up half of the final Combined Partisanship Index, because recalculating the other half, the Median Partisanship Index is a lot more difficult, and shouldn't change the results much. The results are shown in the table below. If one removes every direct Bush reference from consideration ("Bush", "Bush administration", "George W. Bush", "President Bush", "George Bush", "Bushies", etc.), there still would be enough remaining negative references to the "administration", Dick Cheney, etc. so that Mr. Krugman's total partisanship score would drop only from 74 to 73, second only to Ann Coulter out of our 32 active pundits.

Well, what if we also remove all administration references which don't include the Bush name directly, such as "administration", "White House", "the president", and other members of the administration such as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? Even then, there would be enough remaining negative references to Tom DeLay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and generic references to "Republicans" so that Mr. Krugman's score would drop only to 53, still good enough for 8th place behind Mona Charen. In fact, even if every single Republican reference of any kind is ignored in Mr. Krugman's 2003 columns, his favorable treatment of Democrats alone would make his score 54, again earning him 8th place in total partisanship among the 32 active pundits!

Scope	D+	D-	D=	R+	R-	R=	Total PI	Rank
All	45	10	10	40	523	76	74	2
Remove all Bush references	45	10	10	21	290	40	73	2
Remove all administration references	45	10	10	20	87	21	53	8
Remove all Republican references	45	10	10	0	0	0	54	8

I'm a little surprised that Krugman fans such as Demosthenes don't take an approach closer to that of Markus -- sure, Paul Krugman may be partisan but he's also a brilliant economist, he's "the most important political columnist in America", etc. Instead, they continue to try various theories (Krugman is simply being critical of the party in power, he simply disagrees with the Republicans on economics, etc.) which don't stand up at all if one takes the time to systematically examine the complete set of columns over several years (which is the point of Lying in Ponds). As the above analysis clearly shows, Paul Krugman is not merely hostile to George W. Bush or to the Bush administration. Over the 250 columns analyzed so far, not a single one has consisted mainly of praise, however tepid, for any Republicans, and not a single one has consisted mainly of criticism, however gentle, for any Democrats. Perhaps one or two contrary columns will appear as the debate between Democratic presidential candidates heats up later this year, but I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that Paul Krugman is an extremely partisan columnist, regardless of how much one admires his views and shares his enemies.

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WSJ VS. OPINIONJOURNAL.COM: Reader Michael Kurtz has periodically found it necessary to remind me that the Wall Street Journal and its OpinionJournal.com website are not the same thing. A couple of weeks ago he tried again to keep me straight on that point when I discussed the Michael Tomasky report:

Concerning the comparison of LIP's results for WSJ vs NYT with Tomasky you should note that LIP does not measure the WSJ editorial page in any way. While the NYT has a number of regular columnists which LIP follows, the WSJ is not arranged the same way. For example yesterday the WSJ had 4 opinion pieces, one by a regular columnist. LIP did not evaluate any of these, Rosett, the (now inactive) LIP writer was only on the Opinion Journal web page, not in the paper itself. Likewise today the WSJ has 4 opinion pieces, one by a regular columnist; the LIP (inactive again) columnist, Fund, is again not in the actual paper, but is on the OJ page.

Only two of the columnists listed by the WSJ as columnists are covered by LIP (Henninger and Bartley), all the others are OJ columnists, who sometimes get their stuff into the main paper, but not usually. The WSJ columnists who cover politics are: Bartley, Gonzalez, Harwood & Seib, Henninger, Hunt, Jenkins, Kempe, Melloan, Murray, Restall, and Wessel.

He's right of course. Since I track only columnists which are accessible on the OpinionJournal.com site, I need to remember to stress the distinction between the OpinionJournal.com and the actual WSJ, and that the difference is more extensive than just the omission of Al Hunt.

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HOW'S YOUR CHOLESTEROL? Yesterday I burdened you with the dreaded baseball batting average/partisanship index analogy. Today I'll try out a new one, by comparing the partisanship index to the blood cholesterol level. Total blood cholesterol levels below 180 mg/dl are considered "ideal", values between 180 and 199 are "acceptable", values between 200 and 219 are "borderline high", and values of 220 or higher are considered "too high". I assume that a value of zero is impossible, and that no one would argue that the mere measurement of blood cholesterol implies that the presence of any cholesterol at all is bad.

Yet that's the kind of objection I frequently encounter when attempting to measure partisanship (see yesterday's discussion). I expect most pundits to systematically favor one party over the other for ideological reasons -- there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But when the partisanship index gets very high, it suggests that a columnist is not truly offering independent views. As with cholesterol levels, the difference between normal and excessive partisanship is certainly debatable. But my hope is that the partisanship index as calculated here is solid enough to highlight the obvious partisanship of those pundits who write 250 columns without crossing party lines, or who wish a violent death for their political opponents.

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SADLY, NO: A weblog called Sadly, no! has offered some thoughtful criticism of Lying in Ponds. Part of the criticism seems to be that the methods used here are not hard enough on Ann Coulter, although oddly there was no mention of the fact that Ms. Coulter currently has the highest partisanship score. Here are a few of the points raised by Sadly, no! and brief responses.

1. Most people (especially those who write opinion pieces -- or have blogs) are going to be (at least) moderate partisans. They'll support a given party, and/or a general set of policy preferences, certain levels and types of government intervention, etc. Expecting them to do anything else seems a bit foolish and pointless.

   I encounter this same question again and again; the answer is in the site summary quoted in Sadly, no!'s post: "Lying in Ponds tries to draw a fundamental distinction between ordinary party preference and excessive partisanship." I also expect pundits to be moderate partisans, but I'm trying to highlight those who go far beyond that.

2. A more useful index would be not a partisan one, but a hack index: to what extent do columnists stretch the truth, make things up or repeat long discredited falsehoods in the elaboration of their arguments?

   Here's what I said a week ago: "Lying in Ponds is focused on the issue of partisanship. My view is that partisanship may lead a columnist to employ 'irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions' (see Spinsanity on Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer), or it may lead a columnist to carefully omit any perspective or inconvenient facts which contradict their own partisan worldview ('accurate', but full of half-truths). I think the former is worse than the latter, but both make rational political decision-making more difficult by contributing another source of distortion rather than illumination to the political debate."

3. The word "liberals" isn't flagged by LIP, but is (routinely) used by Coulter to refer to Democrats, on the assumption that the proportion of people who view liberals as inherently suspicious is much greater than those who think the same of Democrats.

   That's a good point; I've discussed it recently here. The problem was minor until I added Ann Coulter this year; but with her heavy use of "liberals" it's now a bigger problem. So beginning today I will tag the words "liberal" and "conservative" and evaluate each occurrence to see if it is being used a synonym for "Democrat" and "Republican".

4. I really don't understand the criticism of the evaluation of the references to Senators Hutchinson and Kassebaum as negative in this Coulter passage:

   After a lifetime of honorable service to his country, Adm. Kelso was barely permitted to retire with four stars, in a 54-43 Senate vote. A majority of Democrats opposed Kelso, along with all the Republican women in the Senate -- Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Arlen Specter, Bob Packwood and so on.

   Ms. Coulter is strongly supporting Admiral Kelso in the column, thus she is criticizing all four Republicans who voted against him, with an extra dig at Specter and Packwood.

5. Wouldn't that make the sentence "When Al Gore lost the election to George Bush in 2000" a double partisan reference? (Democrat/Negative, Republican/Positive.) If so -- what is the meaning of such an exercise? When even the most neutral statements of facts are viewed through the prism of partisanship it indicates not an excessive partisanship, but an excessive willingness to characterize all debate (and hence discredit) as being excessively partisan.

   I think this goes to the heart of Sadly, no!'s misunderstanding of the approach. Yes, "Al Gore" would be evaluated as a negative Democratic reference and "George Bush" would be evaluated as a positive Republican reference. But no, that doesn't mean that the statement is being characterized as excessively partisan. The partisanship scores presented on Lying in Ponds depend on hundreds of references over dozens of columns. A partisan Republican columnist could easily write columns filled with negative statements about the Clinton administration, leaving out any counterbalancing positive information or perspective. Even if they were careful to be entirely factual with their one-sided presentation, wouldn't that be evidence of partisanship?

Individual references, or even single paragraphs or columns may be quite misleading, but my premise is that when large sets of columns over many months or years are evaluated this way, excessive partisanship becomes apparent. My favorite analogy is the batting average in baseball. A player might get three hits in a game, but all of them "cheap" (infield hit, bloop single, a hit that should have been scored an error). In that case, the batting average for that one game would be very misleading, but over a sufficient number of at-bats it should be meaningful because the cheap hits and line-drive outs tend to cancel each other out, leaving a reasonable measure of hitting performance. In the same way, Ann Coulter will write some columns where she criticizes Republicans here and there, and others where she may state something mildly positive about Democrats. I've already marveled at the difficulty of quantifying Ms. Coulter's off-the-charts negativity, but over 34 columns so far this year, her partisanship is unmistakable, clearly indicated by her number one ranking in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.

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On the contrary...the fact that no one is reacting to Ann Coulter's latest outrage may be proof that fewer people are now taking her seriously. The only reason to get upset about the ravings of a harridan is if her ravings are taken seriously. We may be seeing the final realization that Ann Coulter is nothing but our village idiot, albeit an entertaining one.

ON SCHEER: Sometimes you jump the shark; sometimes the shark jumps you. Stefan Sharkansky jumped on Robert Scheer the other day, accusing him of hypocrisy on property taxes in a recent column (link from Henry Hanks and Glenn Reynolds). Mr. Scheer gets a better reception from Mickey Kaus: "Give LAT columnist Robert Scheer points--he's willing to dis his friend Arianna Huffington."

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Partisanship
The state, condition, or practice of a partisan; zealous or blind support of one's party.

1831 CARLYLE Sart. Res. III. i, Not out of blind sectarian partisanship. 1867 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. I. iv. 268 The frenzy of religious partizanship.

Partisanship can be practiced on the behalf of a political party, ideology, religion, etc., but the negative connotation of the word goes back to at least the 19th century and Thomas Carlyle, unless one believes that devious Republicans have infiltrated the Oxford English Dictionary.

DEFINING PARTISANSHIP: Pandagon disagrees strongly with Lying in Pond's attempts to make a distinction between partisanship and ideology:

How do you have a site that ranks "partisanship" without knowing what partisanship is? Partisanship is the fervent belief in and promotion of an ideology, so one would actually be more inclined to be partisan on an ideological level. Nor is "partisanship" a good or bad thing on balance.

Partisanship is a word that's being defined right out of existence, thanks in no small part to efforts like this. It's come to mean "not agreeing with me", on both sides of the aisle. Democrats who disagreed with Bush on the war were being "partisan". After September 11th, we were supposed to transcend ideology (and therefore partisanship). All partisan means is that I have a strongly held set of beliefs. Chances are, if you're talking about politics, you're a partisan for one thing or another. If we didn't have partisans, there would be no informed political debate.

Partisanship only has to do with the fervor of belief in one's held values. Complaints of "partisanship" are actually not about partisanship at all, but rather tone, meaning, attitude and the like. "Partisan", like "liberal", has been turned into the naughty political word du jour, to the point where people simply don't know what it means anymore. It's Luskinitis.

Pandagon has been similarly dismissive once before. First, I agree completely that partisanship does not mean "not agreeing with me"; that's exactly the kind of thing that this site is trying to combat. It seems that Pandagon is insisting on its own narrow definition of partisanship in place of the one found in any dictionary. One definition is permanently affixed to the site summary (top right corner of the main page); here's another from the Webster's New World Dictionary on my bookshelf:

partisan: a person who takes the part of or strongly supports one side, party or person; often specif., an unreasoning, emotional adherent.

Clearly, Pandagon's concept of partisanship (fervent belief in an ideology) is one possibility, but the definition also includes a couple of other components. First, support of a political party is a common and acceptable use of the term. Second, there is often the negative implication of "blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance". Although Pandagon argues that partisanship is not "a good or bad thing on balance", I'm not aware of any pundits who identify themselves as partisan -- Paul Krugman has explicitly denied it. Mr. Krugman's own use of the word "partisan" or "partisanship" in columns this year has uniformly used the negative connotation: "raw partisanship", "partisan Republicans", "partisan Democrat", "blatant partisanship", "partisan hack", etc.

Lying in Ponds plainly focuses on this common definition of partisanship -- unreasoning allegiance to a political party. The point is to try to quantify the difference between an independent pundit who has the "fervor of belief in one's held values" and one who seems instead to be mindlessly devoted to a political party.

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Those who profess concern for the state of American democracy or honesty in democratic debate - as Ivins, Jackson and Dean all do - should do their part to improve the discourse by refraining from rhetorical excesses and falsehoods.

Spinsanity has criticized Molly Ivins a few times over the past couple of years, but she has not yet been honored with her own section on their topics page.

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When you look at the resulting page of statistics for David Brooks' columns, his partisanship score is 46, which would place him ninth on our list, just ahead of Mary McGrory. Mr. Brooks' relatively high score is mostly due to extravagant praise of George W. Bush -- in fact his columns most resemble Peggy Noonan's this year. He has made over 80 positive references but only a few negative references to the president. Although much of the praise is in the context of Mr. Brooks' strong support for the war in Iraq, his columns on other subjects -- Bill Frist, Michael Kelly, Arnold Beichman, welfare reform, and economics -- have also stayed safely within party lines. In the Donald Luskin National Review Online article, Mr. Brooks responded to the preceeding analysis: "It's a question of my temperament, and my temperament is not particularly partisan." These six months of The Weekly Standard columns certainly do not prove that Mr. Brooks is partisan, but compared to his soon-to-be colleagues at The New York Times, he appears to tilt far more to the Republican side than William Safire. The addition of Mr. Brooks should broaden the ideological range of the Times pundits; we'll see if his commentary will continue to be as one-sided as it has been at The Weekly Standard so far this year.

There was a very interesting interview with David Brooks in a Chicago Tribune article by Julia Keller last week. Here Mr. Brooks describes his ideological approach:

Q. You're classified as a conservative. Is that fair, or do you bristle at labels?

A. I think it's fair in the general sense. I consider myself a Teddy Roosevelt conservative. I'm not a free market libertarian. I like an aggressive foreign policy. On domestic policy, I'm a neoconservative. I like welfare reform. I like vouchers and charter schools. I do support gay marriage, which I think comes from knowing a lot of gay people.

Q. Some people have said you're the "good" face of conservatism. What they mean, I think, is that you seem like a nice guy. Is this so?

A. [Laughs] A lot of my closest friends are liberals. I think you need both liberals and conservatives. If you had just one side in charge, they'd run the country off a cliff.

I've criticized Donald Luskin in the past for ad hominem attacks on Mr. Krugman, and unfortunately he's still doing it. But I've tried to stay out of the frequent arguments between Mr. Krugman's detractors and defenders; Lying in Ponds is focused on the issue of partisanship. My view is that partisanship may lead a columnist to employ "irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions" (see Spinsanity on Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer), or it may lead a columnist to carefully omit any perspective or inconvenient facts which contradict their own partisan worldview ("accurate", but full of half-truths). I think the former is worse than the latter, but both make rational political decision-making more difficult by contributing another source of distortion rather than illumination to the political debate.

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Gore advisers cooed that "Gray would certainly be one of those names that would have to be in the mix." Both were said to be "cautious, moderate 'New Democrats.'" Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam, which would make a Gore-Davis presidential ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire.

CORNETT ON TOMASKY: Susanna Cornett at Cut on the Bias responds to my Tomasky analysis from yesterday:

So it appears that Tomasky may have identified a greater tendency on the part of the WSJ vs the NY Times to hold the party line in general. That's an important finding, but I think it's also important to recognize two things: Tomasky's sample was not broad enough to render his findings representative of liberal vs conservative newspapers as a whole, and his study dealt strictly with editorials, not the news content of the papers. It would take another kind of study altogether to determine if the NY Times' liberal ideology spills over significantly into its supposedly objective news coverage. And the same is true of the WSJ's news coverage.

I agree that the Tomasky study was narrowly focused, just as Lying in Ponds is. Readers here sometimes suggest that I should try to extend the approach beyond opinion columns to news coverage, but it makes my brain hurt just to think about how difficult that would be.

TOMASKY BY ON THE MEDIA: Bob Garfield of National Public Radio's On The Media interviewed Michael Tomasky about his study; you can read the transcript. Thanks to reader Sean Landis for pointing it out to me.

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1. I agree with Timothy Noah that it was a mistake for Mr. Tomasky to include in his analysis The Washington Post, and The Washington Times isn't comparable to either "liberal" paper. However The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal should be fairly comparable to each other, and his results don't change much when limited to just those two, as pointed out by Mr. Noah.
2. Although Mr. Tomasky's methods are roughly similar to those used here at Lying in Ponds, our results can't be easily compared. He evaluates only a newspaper's unsigned editorials, while I evaluate only regular political columnists. There's not really an overlap, except that some columnists may also be involved in writing the editorials (e.g. Robert Bartley for the WSJ). He evaluates entire editorials as either positive, negative or mixed, while I evaluate each party reference within each column. He goes back to 1993 searching for suitable analogs between the Clinton and Bush II administrations, while my work began only last year and involves evaluating every column. Despite those differences, when I evaluated all of the regular columnists last year and calculated "team" scores, the WSJ (actually the OpinionJournal.com, since it didn't include Al Hunt) came out ahead of the NYT, 26 to 21, lending some support to Mr. Tomasky's thesis.
3. When I use Mr. Tomasky's numbers to calculate a Lying in Ponds Partisanship Index, the WSJ gets a 76, far higher than the NYT's 26. A Partisanship Index of 76 (out of 100) rises into rarefied territory, where only titans of partisanship such as Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman reside. As Mr. Tomasky points out, most of the difference results from the fact that the NYT frequently criticized Bill Clinton, while the WSJ has been far less willing to criticize George W. Bush. It seems to me that this is Mr. Tomasky's most significant finding; the difference is very large and I don't think it can be explained away by Howell Raines' antipathy toward Bill Clinton.
4. A central goal of Lying in Ponds has been to try to discern the difference between ordinary party preference caused by sincere ideological belief, and excessive partisanship. While it's possible that the difference between the WSJ and NYT could be merely an indication that the WSJ is ideologically closer to George W. Bush than the NYT was to Bill Clinton, Mr. Tomasky's separation of issues into "Policy" and "Politics/Process" is very helpful and revealing. The Tomasky data for the NYT shows exactly the pattern I would expect to see if it were ideologically liberal but not very partisan. The NYT editorial board only occasionally diverged from Bill Clinton on policy issues (e.g. welfare reform), but very frequently opposed him on non-ideological process issues, such as the secrecy of Hillary Clinton's health care task force. In contrast, the WSJ data shows exactly what I would expect if it were ideologically conservative but also very partisan. Their editorials occasionally criticized George W. Bush on policy issues (e.g. steel tariffs), but supported him almost completely on questions of process (17 positive editorials, 1 mixed and zero negative editorials). An editorial board might believe that a White House occupied by their own party was right 80% or 90% of the time on policy, but if they were not partisan they would certainly take note of human foibles which are universally condemned but common in all political operations -- hypocrisy, hubris, fumbled nominations, a desire for secrecy (e.g. the Cheney energy task force) and so on. This is the key point which I think Andrew Cline misses in his critique of Mr. Tomasky's report: "It doesn't take a study to assert that liberals will tend to allow a wider range of ideological flux in their discourse. That is neither good nor bad." But the major difference between the NYT and WSJ was not in the ideological range of their opinions, but in their approach to these less-ideological issues.

Howard Kurtz has said that Michael Tomasky "is a certified liberal, so some may be inclined to discount his findings. But the nature of his research makes it harder to dismiss." Even allowing some room for Mr. Tomasky's biases, I think that his fundamental conclusion is correct -- editorials in The Wall Street Journal have been systematically more partisan than those in The New York Times over many years. One of the striking things about the Times roster of columnists is that, with the obvious exception of Paul Krugman, they are just not very partisan. Rich, Dowd, Herbert, Keller, Kristof, Friedman, and Safire -- they've all shown an ability to cross party lines often enough to keep their Lying in Ponds partisanship scores relatively low. Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have stated policies of editorial independence, but the NYT has done a far better job of living up to that standard.

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MORE REACTION TO TOMASKY: The Michael Tomasky study has provoked a wide range of reaction. Howard Kurtz talked about it on Tuesday. Timothy Noah largely praised it in Slate on Wednesday. Andrew Cline gave Tomasky an "F" in a Rhetorica post on Thursday.

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It is unacceptable for a major national columnist to repeatedly make factually inaccurate claims. Yet Robert Scheer continues to create and disseminate falsehoods by basing his columns on incomplete or untrue reports when accurate information is available. He needs to stop.

A columnist who makes "factually inaccurate claims" is not necessarily partisan; a pundit could be very partisan yet meticulously accurate in the specifics of their arguments. But the Lying in Ponds view is that "blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance" to a party is a natural enemy of truth and fairness. It shouldn't be surprising that excessively partisan pundits often find it difficult to stick to the facts as they attack their political foes and/or defend their allies.

METAFILTER ON TOMASKY: Metafilter has a discussion thread on the Tomasky partisanship report, with a couple of mentions of Lying in Ponds.

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This study of the partisan intensity of the nation's agenda-setting liberal and conservative editorial pages finds that while the pages are more or less equally partisan when it comes to supporting or opposing a given presidential administration's policy pronouncements, the conservative pages are more partisan-often far more partisan-with regard to the intensity with which they criticize the other side. Also, the paper finds, conservative editorial pages are far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration.

I'll want to comment on it after I've had a chance to digest it. Thanks to Jeff Cetola for bringing my attention to a mention of it in The Washington Times.

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USAGE NOTE: Methodology can properly refer to the theoretical analysis of the methods appropriate to a field of study or to the body of methods and principles particular to a branch of knowledge. In this sense, one may speak of objections to the methodology of a geographic survey (that is, objections dealing with the appropriateness of the methods used) or of the methodology of modern cognitive psychology (that is, the principles and practices that underlie research in the field). In recent years, however, methodology has been increasingly used as a pretentious substitute for method in scientific and technical contexts, as in The oil company has not yet decided on a methodology for restoring the beaches. People may have taken to this practice by influence of the adjective methodological to mean "pertaining to methods." Methodological may have acquired this meaning because people had already been using the more ordinary adjective methodical to mean "orderly, systematic." But the misuse of methodology obscures an important conceptual distinction between the tools of scientific investigation (properly methods) and the principles that determine how such tools are deployed and interpreted.

So Mr. Smith is absolutely correct. I've changed the "Methodology" link at the top of the page to "Methods".

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Over the past several weeks, debate has raged over whether President Bush lied in his State of the Union address when he claimed that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa, which would have been a threatening step toward nuclear weapons. Accusations of dishonesty have gone back and forth, leaving it difficult to tell spinners apart from truth-tellers. It's important that the public understand what is known and what is still in dispute. In addition, citizens should be aware of dishonesty and nasty tactics from some of the major players.

In one section, Fritz and Nyhan compile a long list of those they charge with making "false or misleading claims about the President's statement". Three Lying in Ponds pundits are on that list -- Robert Scheer, Nicholas Kristof and William Raspberry. In another section, they criticize William Safire and others, saying that they "crossed the line in their efforts to fend off critics".

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