Lying in Ponds

To follow up on the Kristof/Steven Hatfill issue, I found this transcript of an interview of Nicholas D. Kristof for the NPR program On The Media. The interview is dated August 16, so it must have taken place after Dr. Hatfill’s first press conference but before his second, in which he forcefully criticized Kristof. Something I’ve always been curious about — what does a reporter or columnist do if information provided by an anonymous source turns out to be false?

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post has made his first appearance in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten today, as Michael Kelly drops out. Looking at the statistics for Mr. Krauthammer, the most notable thing is that he has managed only one positive Democratic reference in his 34 columns so far this year. Of course, that gives him one more than either Collin Levey or Kimberly A. Strassel.

With yesterday’s column, Paul Krugman becomes the first columnist to reach 500 references of a single type. You get one guess of which type of reference that would be.

Dr. Steven Hatfill, the weapons expert who has been referred to as a “person of interest” by the Justice Department in the anthrax investigation, held a news conference yesterday in which he sharply criticized Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department and the FBI. Hatfill also took aim at New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who has written several columns which discuss Hatfill, referring to him as “Mr. Z.”: 14 May , 2 July, 12 July, 19 July, and 13 August.

A little while back, the guys at Spinsanity put out an appeal for donations, and I would encourage anyone to support their incredibly worthy efforts. I have no connection to Spinsanity except huge admiration for their stated (and so far well-executed) mission:

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With nine negative Republican references in her column today, Mary McGrory increases her total to 469 for the year, trailing only Paul Krugman, who has 486. Mr. Krugman had 14 negative Republican references in his last column, so he would seem to have the inside track to be the first columnist to reach 500 references of a single type.

Here’s a hypothesis: a characteristic feature of a partisan columnist is the inability to write a column which consists simply of undiluted criticism of one’s own party. Michael Kelly writes what appears to be a hard-hitting Bush column titled The President’s Slipping Grip. To be sure, Mr. Kelly does sharply criticize both the current and former Presidents Bush:

The first President Bush lost his job because the American public came to think he didn’t really care much about doing it. His son is starting to look a lot like a chip off the old 9-iron. If he loses his job for the same reason, that is tough on the Bushes but of no personal concern to the rest of us.

But if the president loses control of his direction of the nation’s security and the nation’s wealth and the nation’s future standing in the world, and if he loses it through what seems like sheer can’t-be-botheredness — well, that would be pretty unforgivable, wouldn’t it?

But Mr. Kelly dilutes his critique by also taking aim at the Clinton administration:

Bush took office at a curiously mixed moment in history. He followed an administration whose war-room approach to governance focused (like a laser, as they used to say) on winning today’s evening news and next year’s elections. Bush inherited tomorrow: a bubble prosperity built on fraud and greed and stupidity encouraged by eight years of mindless cheerleading for the grand New Economy and a phony peace built on eight years of determined failure (e.g., Iraq, the Middle East “peace process,” al Qaeda) to address dangerous realities.

Thank you to reader Andrew Douglass, who pointed me to an online collection of Krugman’s earlier columns:

You mentioned your interest in a source of pre-2002 Krugman writings. Try http://www.pkarchive.org/ (”Columns”)

The archive appears to contain all of Mr. Krugman’s New York Times columns, which began in January 2000. So there will be a little over one year’s worth of Clinton administration columns to consider. I’ll work to download and evaluate Mr. Krugman’s previous columns when I get some time. Mr. Douglass has a generally positive but complex view of Paul Krugman:

Surely it was relatively difficult for economists to criticize Clinton during years of economic growth. Now that things have gone south, whoever is in the White House or Congress is going to take a lot of flak. If you maintain your tallies through future economic (and political) cycles, there might be some interesting comparisons.
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Krugman’s book “The Accidental Theorist” is great, especially for someone like me who is interested in grasping the dismal science. I was frankly surprised when his column debuted that he was so polemical and vitriolic. I think it’s a shame, really, because it obscures his clever insights. On the other hand, it’s nice to have at last some vitriol from the left after many years of the hair-curling editorial pages at the otherwise excellent WSJ.

Scott Rosenberg takes on Paul Krugman’s recent Cisco column:

I generally find New York Times op-ed economist Paul Krugman to be reliable and incisive in his dogged criticism of Bushonomics. But I think he missed the boat today in his comparison of Cisco with Enron. Cisco CEO John Chambers is participating in Bush’s wacky Waco shindig, and Krugman strains to suggest that, somehow, Cisco is like Enron. But the only complaint he musters — aside from noting Chambers’ overly handsome compensation, which puts him in the same boat as a gazillion other overpaid CEOs — is feeble: “The company’s specialty was using its own overvalued stock as currency — paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock.” But as Krugman admits, that’s entirely legal; it’s also plain good business — when the market boosts your stock through the roof, it’s telling you to do something with that value.

Some readers have questioned Paul Krugman’s high ranking by suggesting that he was also negative toward the Clinton administration. An example is a brief entry on Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater News Service. He links to Lying in Ponds, describing it as a “misguided attempt to measure partisanship among pundits (Krugman, for example, treated Clinton harshly as well)”. I wasn’t systematically reading Krugman’s columns back then, so I really don’t know if that is true or not. You can count the references on the Paul Krugman page and see that he has made about 26 positive and only 1 negative Clinton references so far in 2002, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t much more negative in previous years. If anyone has old Krugman columns which are relevant, or can point me to an online source for them, I’ll be happy to write about them here.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus continues to needle Krugman:

Meanwhile, the world is still waiting for Paul Krugman to correct his Texas Rangers error, which he admits on his Web site, in the same NYT space he first broadcast it in. …P.S.: Doesn’t Gail Collins, as editor of the NYT editorial page, have the power to make Krugman correct his errors in his column? Presumably the NYT has some sort of policy about corrections, and it’s not “columnists have no responsibility.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz makes an appearance with her first column since April.

JAGUAR: Mac OS X 10.2 (”Jaguar“) arrived this week. I installed it with no problem — yesssssss!

There’s a tight grouping of columnists near the bottom of the Lying in Ponds Top Ten. Michael Kelly, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Kinsley and Kimberley A. Strassel have all taken turns in the Top Ten, and now it’s Maureen Dowd’s turn. Something that stands out from Ms. Dowd’s columns this year is her antipathy toward Vice President Dick Cheney — she has made 47 negative references to him, far more than any other pundit. Here’s Eric Alterman’s take on Dowd:

Maureen Dowd is the pundit who probably made the biggest splash, day-in, day-out, during the Clinton administration. Curiously apolitical, Dowd was a flashy stylist who covered politics as if she were writing personal diary entries or perhaps letters to her mother. If [Frank] Rich viewed politics as theater, Dowd saw it as sitcom. She commented on the style of the actors but never took seriously what any of them had to say. Sometimes a given actor would infuriate her by breaking some moral rule that Dowd did not consider to be among the forgivable sins.

Even though her politics were impossible to discern, Dowd enjoyed outsized influence throughout the punditocracy, in large measure owing to her audacious style and unique perspective.

Mr. Alterman goes on to describe Ms. Dowd’s harsh criticism of first Bill Clinton and then Kenneth Starr during the Lewinsky scandal, taking special exception to her treatment of Ms. Lewinsky.

After weeks of a vacation, a business trip and a major computer failure, things could get back to near-normal this week. The rankings haven’t shown much movement lately, although Collin Levey has climbed into second place. Her score is not very robust because she makes so few partisan references, but those she does make all point in the Republican direction.

Tomorrow is primary election day here in North Carolina. It would normally have been held in May, but was delayed due to court battles over redistricting. Since I’m an election official for my neighborhood precinct, I’ll be at the polls all day (6:30 am - 7:30 pm) and will probably not even try to evaluate columns; hopefully I can catch up on Wednesday.

David S. Broder has an interesting discussion of why partisanship tends to succeed in Congress in today’s column, The Gridlock Dilemma:

At the same meeting, Sarah A. Binder of the Brookings Institution and George Washington University said the evidence shows that while gridlock may be damaging to the reputation of Congress, individual lawmakers are not punished by their voters for the failings of the institution and thus have little incentive to worry about such matters.

I would argue that part of the reason that politicians are able to get away with bad behavior is that even the most snarling partisan can count on support — or at least silence — from many pundits whose own partisanship prevents them from being the independent voice needed by a democratic system. Thankfully, Mr. Broder is one such independent voice.

KELLER ON KERRY: Senator John Kerry was the subject of a fair and balanced column by Bill Keller yesterday.