Lying in Ponds

In his introduction of this web site on Metafilter, MiguelCardoso says:

But why is being openly partisan seen as such a terrible thing in America? Why is so much time and effort expended to hide it or deny it? Or, put another way, why is bipartisanship such a desirable thing, often presented as being somehow above politics? Is it American exceptionalism again?

There were some interesting responses made by others; let me put in my two cents. In Eric Alterman’s book Sound and Fury : The Making of the Punditocracy, he describes how the very partisan American newspapers of the 19th century gave way to the idea of objective journalism in the 20th. Mr. Alterman thinks this has led to boring journalism and bad punditry; he argues for a system more like that in the U.K., where newspapers are more overtly ideological (are they overtly partisan?).

I wouldn’t have a problem with an ideological or partisan newspaper if it were honestly acknowledged. But I think that truly independent analysis is an invaluable part of the political debate. Partisan commentary is like advertising — there may be some useful information along with the distortion, but it’s very difficult to make good decisions based on advertising alone.

Politicians are self-defined as partisans, but major American newspapers claim to be independent, and even the columnist dominating the Lying in Ponds rankings rejects the notion that he is partisan. Lying in Ponds is an attempt to encourage independent commentary by analyzing those who claim to practice it.

Lying in Ponds was mentioned on Metafilter on Friday. It generated some interesting comments; I’ll probably try to respond to some of them soon.

A common objection to the idea of evaluating the partisanship of columnists is that “pundits are supposed to be partisan”. One problem with that is that the columnists themselves will deny that they are partisan. Another is that the major newspapers explicitly declare their independence. The New York Times Newspaper 2001 Fact Book explains it this way (emphasis mine):

In 1935 Adolph S. Ochs died. In his will he reiterated the principles that he had often expressed publicly. Publishers, editors and reporters of The Times have striven to adhere to them ever since. The Times, he wrote, should be operated as “an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, devoted to the public welfare without regard to individual advantage or ambition, the claims of party politics or personal prejudice or predilection.”

It was his hope that The Times’s editorial pages “may continue to reflect the best informed thought of the country, honest in every line, more than fair and courteous to those who may sincerely differ with its views”, that “its news columns may continue fairly to present, without recognizing friend or foe, the news of the day — ‘All the News Thats Fit to Print’ — and to present it impartially, reflecting all shades of opinion,” and that “its business departments may continue to conform to the highest standards of business ethics and that all persons associated or connected with any of the departments of The New York Times organization may be treated justly and generously.”

With today’s columns, Claudia Rosett edges past WSJ teammate Collin Levey into second place, and Michael Kelly rises from 10th to 8th. Interestingly, Mr. Kelly had not mentioned Al Gore in any column this year until today’s blistering attack on Mr. Gore’s recent Iraq speech:

Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts — bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Back in May, Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity recommended that I read a book called Why Parties?, by John H. Aldrich, a Political Science professor at Duke. The book is very good; it gave me a much better understanding of the development of parties and the constructive roles they play.

Let me try an analogy which helps explain my view of parties. I generally support free market capitalism because I think it provides the best result for most people, despite the fact that it allows (and some would say encourages) greed, resulting in many obvious abuses (Enron, etc.). In the same way, party politics also seems to produce generally good results in a democratic system, despite the fact that it is at least partly driven by ambition and a kind of tribalism that often leads to obvious abuses. In both cases, I would say that it is critical that there exist effective mechanisms to constrain these negative aspects. In the case of capitalism, constraints would come from honest independent accountants, government regulators, an independent business press, etc. In the case of parties, constraints would come from honest elections and an independent press, among other things.

The premise of this web site is that columnists from major newspapers should be (and in fact claim to be) politically independent (not neutral, poised between the two parties, but rather independent, not beholden to either one, able to take independent positions, even though they will tend to tilt one way or the other). So I attempt to measure how often a columnist’s writings tend to line up with one party or another, implying that when they line up too closely, it suggests that a columnist is not truly independent and is failing to play the effective “Consumer Reports”-type of role that they should.

As an aside, I expect politicians themselves to be quite partisan. The book makes it very clear that in affiliating with a party, a politician is accepting a reduction in their own ideological independence in exchange for other benefits. But I don’t see how a political columnist is in a similar position. In choosing not to identify with a party, a pundit should be completely free to pursue truth, unconstrained by the personal political considerations which limit politicians.

Here are three interesting weblogs which deal with media bias and related issues:

1. Susanna Cornett publishes Cut on the Bias: “keeping an eye on the spins and weirdness of media, crime and everyday life.”
2. Media Minded is written by an anonymous “copy editor at one of America’s largest daily newspapers.”
3. According to Dr. Andrew R. Cline: “The Rhetorica Network, including my Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal web log, is my attempt to explain the persuasive tactics of politics and the press.”

A reader recently asked why mentions of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt are not tagged and evaluated as partisan references. At the beginning I made a decision to ignore references to political figures before World War II. My reasoning is that Lincoln and other older figures are very rarely or never used for current partisan arguments, so references to them are irrelevant to the question of partisanship in the punditry, although I recognize that any cut-off is arbitrary. If anything I think it might be better to have a later cut-off — I’ve noted before that some Republican pundits have made several (or all) of their rare positive Democratic references to Franklin D. Roosevelt, which suggests that FDR is far enough back in history that they consider it “safe” to praise him without giving aid and comfort to their current partisan opponents.

Continuing the thread from yesterday, here’s a plot of the total number of Enron references from all pundits in each month of 2002. Mr. Krugman has 6 of the 11 September references so far.

As previously noted, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman dominate the pundit field in references to the word “Enron”. With today’s column, Mr. Krugman continues his pattern of mentioning Enron in at least one column in every month of 2002. Mr. Rich took a break in May, and also did not mention Enron in his one recent September column.

When I started evaluating columns for partisanship, I was very concerned that individual columns which have only a few offhand political references might hurt the ability of the rankings to reflect actual partisanship. It’s still an open question, but I’m beginning to believe that some columnists actually reveal their partisanship most clearly in their non-political columns. In June, I commented on a Thomas J. Bray column, in which praise of golf seemed to trigger a partisan word association to Bill Clinton and fraud.

Yesterday’s Mary McGrory column is another example. Ms. McGrory writes a charming column entirely about gardening, but finds a way to somehow bring in George W. Bush and criticize him because he “hates international treaties”. This column paints a picture of Ms. McGrory’s world as one where Democrats are like Tony Lake and George Stephanopoulos — who help her with gardening — while Republicans are like John Ehrlichman — who threatened her “anti-war pals”. Looking over McGrory’s columns this year, you can find political columns like the one in June where she lavishly praised her Republican friend Elliot Richardson, but nothing that looks like a counterpart to the gardening column.