Lying in Ponds

A couple of top ten columnists have made moves up the charts this week. Collin Levey jumped from 10th to 5th after her column yesterday took on criticism of roller coasters. She had one negative Democratic reference: “Rep. Edward Markey (D.- Mass.) has been on a crusade for years, though nobody is exactly sure why.” Levey is a columnist whose partisanship score is not very robust, because it’s based on so few references. On the other hand, she is also one of three WSJ columnists who have not yet made a single positive Democratic reference in 2002 — Levey, Dorothy Rabinowitz and Kimberly A. Strassel. I don’t know if there’s any significance to the fact that all three are women, but Claudia Rosett had her first positive Democratic reference of the year only yesterday, to a Democrat who’s been dead for over 50 years.

Michael Kinsley jumps into second place after today’s column criticizing Dick Cheney for accounting problems at Halliburton: “It would be the sheerest demagoguery to suggest that a person should take the blame for a company’s shenanigans just because he happened to be CEO at the time. Heck, no. That’s what accountants are for.”

An oddity today, all five of today’s columns have a PI of zero. In Paul Krugman’s column, “Reagan recession” and “Bush recession” are evaluated as negative Republican references, while two mentions of the “Reagan recovery” are evaluated as positive Republican references.

Brendan Miniter has now been added to the list of the Wall Street Journal’s regular columnists; he and two others had been inadvertently omitted. Miniter enters the rankings in 11th place with a Republican partisanship index which fits in comfortably with his WSJ peers. Notably, he takes over the lead in Negative Democratic Index, mostly because of a very anti-Clinton column last week, in which he accused Bill Clinton of “disrespect for the military” and a “lackadaisical attitude about national security.”

Today’s Raleigh News & Observer carried the full text of last week’s NC State University commencement address by William Raspberry . I was really impressed by what he said and found it relevant to Lying in Ponds:

Yet we seldom take the effort to recruit allies from among those who hold views different from our own. Conservatives are (to liberals) people who don’t care about minorities, or women, or “the little people,” not decent men and women who have a different view of what works. Liberals are (to conservatives) people who want only to tax and spend the country into bankruptcy, not thoughtful men and women who want America to work for everyone. Each sees the other as enemy.

Surprisingly often, I have discovered, a focus on the problem, rather than on political enemies, could disclose common interests and lead to innovative solutions.

I wasn’t able to update the site for the last several days while traveling on business because I couldn’t seem to get connected online from the hotel room. I’m still not sure why it would’t work. Anyway, sorry for the delay!

In today’s column, Michael Kelly uses Robert Caro’s new volume on Lyndon Johnson as an occasion to summarize recent presidents, especially those he labels “monster-greats”:

The obvious point in common about the monster-greats — LBJ, FDR, Nixon, Clinton and, I would add, John F. Kennedy — is that they all were maniacally driven men. They got the presidency because, in large measure, they wanted it so much that they were, in a sense, mad; they were great because they were monsters.

Most of Kelly’s references to the presidents are evaluated as neutral, because, as seen in the above passage, he simultaneously praises and criticizes them. He tentatively classifies George W. Bush with Eisenhower and Truman, as “accidents: those who were great because greatness was thrust on them, not because they were driven to greatness.”

With that column, Kelly drops behind Robert L. Bartley into third place. His ranking has been volatile lately, because his Median PI (median of the group of individual column PI’s) has been swinging back and forth. Here is the ordered list of his column PI’s (negative numbers indicate Republican-leaning columns): -100, -100, -90, -83, -75, -67, -60, -50, -6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100. Today’s column (-6) changed the median value from -50 to -28 (halfway between the -50 and -6). I guess this lack of robustness is just a basic consequence of the small sample size. One reader suggested a different statistical approach which might help; I’ll have to look into it.

Travel: I’ll be on a business trip for the rest of the week. I should be able to update the site from the road, although the comments may have to be brief or nonexistent.

Jonathan Chait criticized David S. Broder in The New Republic last week for “sneering” at the idea by Chait and others that John McCain might run for president as a Democrat. Reihan Salam summarized Thomas L. Friedman last month as “A little namby-pamby, but a must-read. There is no better CW predictor.” And in March, Chait criticized Peggy Noonan, saying that, “for Noonan and her ilk, conservative ideology and personal virtue are so deeply intertwined that it is virtually impossible for a good person to pursue liberal policies or for a conservative politician to be morally flawed.”

Entering the rankings at 13th place with a Republican partisanship index of 19, Dorothy Rabinowitz has now been added to the list of the Wall Street Journal’s regular columnists. Next up, John Fund.

With only five columns so far in 2002, Rabinowitz doesn’t have the minimum number of two columns per month to qualify for the top ten list. The only other columnist with so few columns is Robert Kagan of the Washington Post.

When Andrew Sullivan linked to this site a week ago, he mentioned in passing that it was bizarre that Tunku Varadarajan was leading in the frequency of positive Democratic references. Since then, a couple of other columnists have edged past Varadarajan in that category, but it’s important to understand why those kind of anomalies occur. First of all, the “Positive Democratic Index” is the number of positive Democratic references as a fraction of all kinds of references. Most current commentary focuses on the Republican administration, both positively and negatively, so there have been only half as many references to Democrats as Republicans so far this year, and more of them have been negative than positive. Varadarajan’s positive Democratic ranking is an anomaly arising from the fact that he wrote one column praising Tipper Gore, while most of his columns concern international affairs and have very few domestic political references of any kind.

Colbert I. King created another such anomaly by pounding Senator Robert Byrd in a March column with 36 negative references. When combined with his usually non-political columns, King’s “Negative Democratic Index” was misleadingly high until it was reduced by his recent Kathleen Kennedy Townsend column.

criticizes both George W. Bush and Joseph Lieberman for opposition to the reform of accounting standards.

On Paul Krugman’s website, he posts his reaction to the fact “that some group has pronounced me highly ‘partisan’”. I’ll assume that the “group” is Lying in Ponds (one person). Mr. Krugman makes a serious, thoughtful argument. Following are his comments in full and my (hopefully) respectful response:

ON BEING PARTISAN

I gather, from reading MediaWhoresOnline, that some group has pronounced me highly “partisan”. Here are my thoughts on all that:

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Bush administration was, in a fundamental way, being dishonest about its economic plans. Suppose that the numbers used to justify the tax cut were clearly bogus, and that the plan was in fact obviously a budget-buster. Suppose that the Social Security reform plan simply ignored the system’s existing obligations, and thus purported to offer something for nothing. Suppose that the Cheney energy report deliberately misstated the nature of the country’s actual energy problems, and used that misstatement to justify subsidies to the energy industry.

Suppose also that I found myself writing an economics column as these plans were being sold — and that I was a highly competent economist, if I say so myself. Suppose that as an economist able to do my own analysis, not obliged to rely on conflicting quotes from the usual suspects, I was in a position to spot right away that some of the stuff being peddled made no sense - and clued in enough to get hold of experts who could tell me what was wrong with the other stuff. Suppose that I had been repeatedly proved right in my critiques of the Bush administration’s assertions, even in cases where nobody else in the media was willing to take my criticisms seriously — for example, suppose that, because I understand microeconomics a lot better than your average columnist, I realized that economists who said that California’s electricity crisis had a lot to do with market manipulation were probably right, more than a year before conventional wisdom was willing to contemplate the possibility.

In this hypothetical situation, what sort of columns should I have been writing? Does the ideal of “nonpartisanship” mean that I should have mixed my critiques of Bush policies with praise, or with attacks on the hapless, ineffectual Democrats, just for the sake of perceived balance? Given what I knew to be the truth, would that even have been ethical?

I’ve reported; you decide.

The assumption of Lying in Ponds is that over any period of many months or longer there will invariably arise issues and news events which favor Democrats and also those which favor Republicans. It is not expected that pundits should be neutral in the way they write about the two parties, or that they should feign nonpartisanship. Lying in Ponds is completely in favor of vigorous debate from across the political spectrum, including the kind of sharp criticism of the Bush administration skillfully practiced by Mr. Krugman.

But Mr. Krugman’s argument seems to be that while his 37 columns so far this year have been largely negative toward Republicans, they have been appropriate because there have not been legitimate opportunities for either praise for Bush policies or attacks on Democrats. But I believe that the reason that Mr. Krugman’s partisanship ranking is currently so high is that he has written about some issues in a much more one-sided way than other columnists writing about those same topics. For example, compare Mr. Krugman’s series of Enron articles with those by fellow Times columnist Frank Rich (go to the the Krugman and Rich pages for links to all of their 2002 columns). Krugman and Rich each mentioned Enron over 50 times and attacked various members of the Bush administration and other Republicans with equal vehemence, but there was a major difference. First, Mr. Rich also noted that there are Democratic links to Enron. He discussed both Robert Rubin and Joe Lieberman, but Mr. Krugman did not mention either one. More importantly, Mr. Rich also discussed in detail the similarity of the Global Crossing situation to Enron. By my count he mentioned Global Crossing and Terry McAuliffe eight times each in his columns, while Mr. Krugman made only one mention of each. On the other side of the street, Republican pundits Michael Kelly and Robert L. Bartley each strained to write an entire column on Enron without a single mention of the extensive Republican connections.

So part of the reason that Mr. Krugman’s partisanship score is more than three times larger than Mr. Rich’s is that, unlike Mr. Rich, he focused exclusively on the Republican connections to Enron, while ignoring or minimizing Democratic aspects to the same story. Lying in Ponds will not try to ascribe motives to anyone; it will just continue for the rest of 2002 to try (imperfectly of course) to measure how consistently each pundit’s arguments tend to align along party lines. The premise is that over time, any independent pundit will find many legitimate reasons to significantly criticize their own party or praise the other party. Remember that it’s still early in the year and there are many opportunities for the rankings to change significantly.

Another view on Krugman’s comments comes from the Amateur Economist.

Formatting note: Because this comments column has been getting very long, I’m trying a couple of changes. This side of the page should now be wider. I removed a couple of columns (Total PI and Median PI) from the ranking tables to save some space on the right side.

Yesterday’s WSJ Best of the Web Today linked to Lying in Ponds:

Krugman Watch Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman criticizes the Bush administration for not criticizing a company that has decided, for now, not to take advantage of a tax loophole that long predates the Bush administration. No wonder Krugman has been named America’s “most partisan pundit.”

Notice that they gleefully report Paul Krugman’s position, but fail to mention the prominence of their own pundits in the rankings, both individually and as a group.

Michael Kelly climbs back into second place after he offers a paean to Bush foreign policy. Pete du Pont gives the administration another soft rebuke, praising Bush for “clarity of thought and principled belief” before criticizing him for “self-contradictions and silences”.

Thanks to Howard Kurtz for his very kind mention of Lying in Ponds in his Washington Post Media Notes column yesterday!

Missing Columnists II: After yesterday’s post about the two missing Wall Street Journal columnists, I found Virginia Postrel’s comments about this site. She noted:

The WSJ list isn’t comprehensive — Holman Jenkins and Mary O’Grady are WSJ regulars, for instance — but the difference seems to lie in definitions. The ratings are only for “political” columnists. Jenkins is an economics columnist, while O’Grady covers the Americas. But dropping these less partisan pundits from the WSJ mix, while including Thomas Friedman of the NYT, skews the results. Just because Jenkins doesn’t turn his columns into anti-Democrat screeds doesn’t mean he isn’t doing the same thing Paul Krugman is supposed to do. (The WSJ’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner, Dorothy Rabinowitz, also isn’t included, but she doesn’t write on a regular schedule.)

When I chose which columnists to include at the beginning of the year, my approach was to accept each paper’s definition of their own political columnists, by evaluating all of the pundits they list on each of their three web pages: NYT, WP, and WSJ. I’m not including Jenkins or O’Grady (or Al Hunt) because they’re not on that WSJ page, not because of any judgement on my part. But I messed up and left out Rabinowitz and Miniter, and now that I think of it, I probably should also evaluate John Fund’s column (ouch, more work).

Over the weekend I realized that I somehow missed getting two Wall Street Journal columnists on the list at the beginning of the year: Dorothy Rabinowitz and Brendan Miniter. I’ll try to download and evaluate all of their 2002 columns sometime in the next couple of weeks and add them to the rankings. Several readers have asked why Al Hunt is not included with the WSJ columnists. Lying in Ponds is only analyzing the columnists on the WSJ editorial page.

Robert L. Bartley moves past Peggy Noonan into second place with today’s column.