Lying in Ponds

To demonstrate that each of the newspapers evaluated here have stated policies of editorial independence, I’ve previously posted information from the New York Times and Washington Post. To complete the point, here is what the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal says on its philosophy page (emphasis mine):

The Wall Street Journal has a long and proud tradition of vigorous and independent editorial commentary. …

Looking back over this history, the surprise is not the change of views over the years but the constancy of them. (See “Journal Editorials and the Common Man.”) They are united by the mantra “free markets and free people,” the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money. Against the interference of taxes and ukases by kings and other collectivists. For the defense of individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities. If these principles sound unexceptionable in theory, applying them to current issues is often unfashionable and controversial.

A little further down on the “Our Philosophy” page though, there is an interesting paragraph which suggests that the Journal’s view of editorial independence doesn’t imply ideological diversity:

But coordination of policy positions is not as difficult as an outsider might think, for we are a like-minded group. The most important coordinators–Editor Robert L. Bartley, Deputy Editor Daniel Henninger and Deputy Editor, International George Melloan–have worked together for decades. Similarly, no one needs to tell Assistant Editor Melanie Kirkpatrick or Washington columnist Paul Gigot, or for that matter many junior members of the staff, what the Journal position is going to be. Typically we find conversations starting with the assumption that everyone knows what we are going to say. That is, we are guided by the tradition of free people, free markets set out by Charles Dow and elaborated by a long string of editors since.

The Washington Post has a David Broder column called “The Terminator’s Proposition” on its editorial page today, which appears to be identical to the one which appeared on Sunday. Maybe they decided it had been a mistake to run it on Sunday, because another Broder column, a tribute to Paul Wellstone, appeared on the same day. In any event, you’ll find both of his columns in Sunday’s boxscore.

Recently, Media Minded called attention to an article in The Nation by Michael Massing which criticizes the Washington Post Op-Ed page for devoting too much attention to the pro-war position on Iraq:

A survey of the Post’s opinion pages over the past two months reveals a remarkable imbalance on the subject of Iraq, the great issue of the day. Collectively, its editorials, columns and Op-Eds have served mainly to reinforce, amplify and promote the Administration’s case for regime change. And, as the house organ for America’s political class, the paper has helped push the debate in the Administration’s favor.

Mr. Massing singled out columnist Jim Hoagland, saying that:

Hoagland writes about the issue so regularly (and monotonously) that he felt compelled to defend himself in a mid-October column.

A quick count of the Lying in Ponds archives shows that Mr. Hoagland does in fact lead all pundits in mentions of Iraq:

Mr. Hoagland though, takes pride in his attention to the Iraq issue, as he described in this recent passage (from the column Mr. Massing referred to):

“You sure write a lot about Iraq,” an exasperated editor at The Post said to me in 1998. I took it as an unintended compliment from a colleague who was not eager to devote more space to Saddam Hussein’s transgressions then. Bush’s determination has cleared news space as well as time at the Pentagon for Iraq.

Over the weekend, I made changes so that Lying in Ponds will begin to refer to the “WSJ OpinionJournal” instead of the “Wall Street Journal“. The change is in response to reader Michael Kurtz’s valid point a couple of weeks ago, that the set of regular columnists evaluated on this site from the OpinionJournal.com web site are not equivalent to those of its parent organization, the Wall Street Journal.

Well, I did a Yahoo search on each of the columnists listed on the Blue Eagle Commentary web site, and I’m really shocked by the results. Here are the top twenty, ranked by matches returned by searching with search strings like: “George Will” “columnist”:

Why are the top twenty all conservative? Does this mean that conservative pundits are really that dominant in syndication? I’ll investigate this further . .

Paul Krugman makes a bid for Lying in Ponds approval by making another Monty Python reference in today’s column, his second of the year (first “Bring out your dead”, today the dead parrot). I’ve also come across one reference to the Black Knight in his Y2K columns (I’m almost finished with them, really!). A quick scan of all of this year’s columns shows one Python reference each by Bill Keller and Sebastian Mallaby.

GOOGLE POWER: Traffic to this site increased sharply early this week. As far as I can tell from the logs, the reason was that so many visitors arrived from Google searches for “Maureen Dowd”. The Lying in Ponds Maureen Dowd page is number three on the list (the number two link is to a Brazilian web page in Portuguese!). Out of curiosity, I checked to see the position of Lying in Ponds pages in Google searches for columnists in the top ten:

In general, the better-known columnists have many more links to them, so Lying in Ponds is further down the list. Thomas Bray is an exception — one or more men named Thomas Bray were prominent in Colonial times.

Joe Conason of Salon asks William Safire to eat crow on the Mohammad Atta-Iraq story:

Safire is never corrected and rarely corrects himself — no matter how outrageous or absurd his assertions turn out to be. Writing about sensitive, highly disputatious topics, he scorns careful qualifiers such as “reportedly” and “alleged.” In addition to his predictions about the indictment of Hillary Clinton, which blew up in his face like a trick cigar, he falsely implicated Clinton aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal in criminal conspiracies. Does anybody know why Safire remains exempt from the standards that govern his colleagues?

Lying in Ponds doesn’t know enough to pass judgement on the Atta-Iraq story, but it agrees completely that pundits should take responsibility for positions taken in previous columns — they should not only acknowledge factual errors, but also admit when their predictions have been incorrect.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some information showing the historical principle of editorial independence of the New York Times. Along the same lines, here’s a declaration of the principles of the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

Eugene Meyer’s Principles for The Washington Post

Eugene Meyer had a vision of what makes a newspaper truly great, and that vision included serving the public according to seven principles. He offered them in a speech on March 5, 1935 and published them on his newspaper’s front page.

The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained.

The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.

As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.

What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old.

The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.

In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good.

The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.

Mickey Kaus offers his view on Maureen Dowd:

One reason I don’t share the near-universal blogospheric reaction against Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column is that, despite the crude and overdone Bush caricaturing, she does acknowledge both the pro-war arguments just discussed. She distances herself by putting them in the fictionalized mouth of Richard Perle — but she doesn’t dismiss them. The column isn’t substantively an anti-Bush rant so much as Dowd’s equivalent of William Raspberry’s taxi-driver dialogues, which are designed to ventilate the arguments while allowing the columnist to remain ambivalent. … Much as I’ve done here!

A while back, I mentioned Eric Alterman’s assessment of Dowd as “curiously apolitical”. The Lying in Ponds take on Ms. Dowd is that she doesn’t appear to be very partisan based on her columns this year. She has criticized the Bush administration pretty relentlessly, with special attention to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. But she also has more negative than positive references to Democrats. My interpretation is that Ms. Dowd is mostly non-ideological and her relatively high current ranking is because most of the juicy targets in 2002 for her kind of personal criticism are Republicans.

Something about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent columns seems to be inspiring some critics to become lawmakers. Josh Chafetz, one of the contributors to OxBlog, codifies his criticism of Ms. Dowd into The Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd in The Weekly Standard. Brian Griffin of PulpStalag has a different interpretation of the “Laws”. Meanwhile, Mark Goldblatt explains The Dowd Rule in the National Review Online.

Columnist Collin Levey came perilously close to making her first positive Democratic reference of the year in today’s column on Harry Belafonte’s recent criticsim of Colin Powell:

Mr. Belafonte may have built a second career in political activism, receiving honors from groups like Unicef for his work for children around the world. But somehow, this has become in his own mind an excuse for treating other blacks as traitors if they succeed in careers in mainstream politics and government. Back in 1998 he was just as contemptuous of the idea of Jesse Jackson taking a job in the Clinton administration.

It’s a close call, but I graded the mention of Jesse Jackson as a negative Democratic reference. When a pundit cites someone else’s criticism of a political figure, it is usually evaluated to be a negative reference to them, even if the writer obviously disagrees with the criticism (respect is accorded to the criticism). If the columnist then goes on to defend the criticized politician and ridicule the source of criticism, they will rack up offsetting positive references. In Ms. Levey’s column, she quotes Belafonte’s criticism of Powell, which gets two negative Republican references in the second paragraph. But she then defends Powell at length, praising him and explaining why she thinks Belafonte’s criticism is unfair. Ms. Levey did not similarly defend Jesse Jackson, leaving her in second place in the rankings — one of only three columnists with no positive Democratic references (the others are Dorothy Rabinowitz and Jackson Diehl).

Reader Michael Kurtz responds to last Thursday’s comment about the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal:

Since you leave out the WSJ’s pet liberal, Al Hunt, it seems disingenuous for you to suggest that because the NYT has a pet conservative it is less biased than the WSJ. In any event the bias charge against the NYT is because of its NEWS writing, not because of its OPINION writing. I have not heard this charge recently against either the WSJ or the WP.

The Al Hunt issue has come up several times. 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 editorial page web pages. I’m not including Al Hunt at the WSJ (or some others) because they’re not on that WSJ page, not because of any judgement on my part.

Then Mr. Kurtz followed up by making clear the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the OpinionJournal.com web page:

I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, but you are wrong about the WSJ’s “definition of their own political columnists.” Al Hunt’s column is in exactly the same position in the paper as Robert Bartley’s. What is different about Al Hunt is that his column is not given away for free on the OpinionJournal.com web site. Also you include Peggy Noonan, but her column is normally NOT included in the paper version of the WSJ, but only appears in OpinionJournal.com.

OpinionJournal.com is not the WSJ, and what you are measuring is OpinionJournal.com, minus the weblogger James Taranto. OpinionJournal.com probably represents well the opinions of the editorial board of the WSJ, but it is much to the right of the actual opinion pages of the WSJ.

I think Mr. Kurtz is exactly right. He’s right that Mickey Kaus and others constantly criticize the NYT for bias, but focus mostly on news stories rather than editorials. My point was that the WSJ’s set of regular columnists is less politically diverse than that of the NYT, but he correctly makes a distinction between the OpinionJournal.com web site and the actual WSJ. Since there’s no way I will pay for a $79 annual subscription to the online WSJ just to get Al Hunt’s column, I guess I should adjust my terminology to refer to OpinionJournal.com instead of the WSJ.

WELL, AT LEAST I HAVE MORE FREE TIME: Now that my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are not in the World Series, I won’t have any problem tearing myself away from the TV to do other things.

It’s time to get serious about choosing which pundits to include on next year’s roster. My intention is to make a major change — instead of including all the columnists from the three newspapers, I’d like to have a more diverse set which includes pundits from other major papers (USA Today, L.A. Times), magazines (e.g. Slate, Salon) or who are nationally syndicated (Molly Ivins, Cal Thomas).

Ideally, I could find some list of the “top” pundits, defined in some rational way — the most widely-read, widely-syndicated, most influential, etc. But I’m not aware of such a list, despite a fair amount of Googling. If anyone out there has any ideas, please let me know.

The number of obvious errors in Wall Street Journal columns continues to amaze me. Lots of them this week — Pete du Pont made the common mistake of thinking that Barbra Streisand’s first name is spelled “Barbara” and John Fund spelled RNC Chairman Marc Racicot’s first name as “Mark”. In the same Fund column about the Montana Senate race, there is this puzzling mistake: “Republicans claim the ad implied that Mr. Harris was gay, a potentially negative issue in rural and socially conservative parts of Montana.” The Republican candidate in question is named Mike Taylor, not “Mr. Harris”. Does anyone at the WSJ read these columns before they go out (at 12:01 am every day)?