Lying in Ponds

With today’s
column, the WSJ OpinionJournal’s Thomas J. Bray ends his 2 1/2 year tenure as
a columnist. Mr. Bray spent the year in and out of the Top Ten
— this last column dropped him from 10th to 11th in the final
rankings. He was going to be kept on the Lying in Ponds roster
for next year; we’ll see if the OpinionJournal replaces him with a
new pundit.

Instead of composing comments this week,
I’ve been writing Perl scripts to download and process columns from
the new pundits (coming January 1st!). So I’m cranking out stuff
like this:

 ...
 $stream = HTML::TokeParser->new($file) or
     die "Couldn't read file: $file: $!";
 while ($token = $stream->get_token) {
     if ($token->[0] eq "S"    &&
 	$token->[1] eq "font" &&
 	$token->[2]{'id'} eq "columnist-name-cr") {
 	$column_section = "yes";
     } elsif ($column_section    &&
 	     ! $author          &&
 	     $token->[0] eq "T") {
 	$author = $token->[1];
 ...
 

It’s fun — no, really!

Even now at the very end of the year, there has
been quite a bit of movement in the bottom half of the Top
Ten. The Trent Lott debacle has played a signficant role –
the partisanship scores of many Repbulican-leaning columnists (Pete du Pont, Brendan Miniter, Charles Krauthammer) have dropped and
those of Democratic-leaning pundits like Frank Rich have risen because of columns
critical of Lott.

A web site called pandagon.net doesn’t seem to think
highly of my efforts. Here’s their post from Friday:

Every time I happen upon Lying in Ponds, I am amazed at just how much
work can go into producing something so entirely useless.

First, the proprietor is attempting to “fight partisanship”, which is
kind of dumb when you’re “fighting” the partisan leanings of opinion
writers. The worthlessness of the goal, however, pales in comparison
to the methodology, which basically seems to be Coulteresque word
counts with even less rational thought involved. In a post, he
expounds this genius bit:

When a partisan figure’s actual words are quoted, it is generally
evaluated as a positive reference, even if the columnist then
criticizes those words.

So, if I quote someone, even if the quote is meant to give a negative
impression of the person, it’s a positive reference. I see.

The kicker is that the fool takes TAPped’s side in their debate with
Somerby. That’s just wrong.

The first point comes up constantly — aren’t opinion writers
supposed to be partisan? Well, they have a perfect right to
be, but I’m not aware of any pundits on the Lying in Ponds
roster (or any others) who admit to being partisan. Paul Krugman explicitly

rejected the notion earlier this year. I’ve repeatedly said
(see the philosophy page) that I expect
pundits to have “partisan leanings”, but that I’m trying to make a
fundamental distinction between ordinary party preference and actual
partisanship, as in this dictionary definition of partisan:

1 : a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially
: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

Concerning the criticism of the methodology, “word counts” are a
simple, imperfect tool. But it seems to me to be a
reasonable attempt to quantify the tendency of partisan political
writers to distort the obvious complexity of politics into a
simplistic “good party/bad party” formulation. Frank Rich is an example of an opinionated,
ideological columnist who manages to look beyond the party label and
take consistent, principled positions.

Quite a battle
has developed between Tapped and The Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby.
Lying in Ponds agrees with the Tapped take on Somerby,
both the positive and negative aspects:

Now, it’s true that when Somerby is correcting specific errors or
omissions of fact in the work of mainstream reporters, his work is
very useful and on firm ground, albeit invariably shrill and
sanctimonious. (See his grating favorite rejoinder, “Try to believe
that he wrote it . . .”) But when Somerby launches into one of his pet
theories about why and how the media is biased, his posts frequently
descend into little more than rampant innuendo and conspiracy
theorizing.

In a sense, the way Somerby feels about the media eerily parallels the
way conservatives do. The right imagines that Howell Raines, for
instance, is a ruthless partisan who orchestrates New York Times
coverage down to the sentence, forever looking for ways to screw
Republicans. Somerby, for his part, seems to imagine that half the
reporters in Washington sit around in a room together, drinking coffee
and figuring out ways to screw Al Gore. From what Tapped
has read,
Somerby’s arguments are incredibly reductionist — in Bob’s World,
there is only one explanation for anything that happens in the world
of journalism, and that is that reporters are Covering Up the Truth
and Sucking Up To Power. When reporters criticize the Democrats for
anything at all, it’s because they’re buying into GOP spin. When
reporters don’t write stories that Somerby feels they should be
writing, like the Lott story, it’s always because they are placating
conservatives.

As in October, columnist Collin Levey came perilously close to
making her first positive Democratic reference of the year in today’s
column on a PBS documentary on Islamic history:

That pattern has been consistent in the network’s coverage of the
Middle East. PBS once blessed its viewers with such fare as 1989’s
“Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians,” a show that, as host Hodding
Carter enthused at the time, “reflects opinions rarely heard in
America.”

When a partisan figure’s actual words are quoted, it is generally
evaluated as a positive reference, even if the columnist then
criticizes those words. That principle is not absolute. The quote of
Hodding Carter is minimized in two ways — it’s very short, and it’s
introduced sarcastically (”enthused”). So it’s evaluated as neutral
instead, and Ms. Levey’s record is intact.

Okay, here’s a partial list of
pundits I’d like to add for next year. First, some influential
pundits from other newspapers — Robert Scheer (LA Times),
Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune) and Molly Ivins (Fort Worth
Star-Telegram). I also want someone from the Boston Globe
— Ellen Goodman, Derek Z. Jackson, Jeff Jacoby, Thomas Oliphant? If
anyone has an opinion on that, please let me know.

Second, here are some choices which I’m assuming to be
representative of the dominance of conservative syndicated columnists
in the heartland — Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Ann Coulter, Thomas
Sowell, Cal Thomas, and Walter Williams. Once again, I’ve been looking
for pundits who: (1) are influential; (2) focus on national rather than
local or international issues; (3) focus on substance or ideology
rather than electoral politics; and (4) write regular, frequent
columns which are available online for free. A fair number of
prospects fail on point (3) (Michael Barone, Robert Novak, Walter
Shapiro, Jules Witcover, etc.) or point (4) (Peter Beinart, Margaret
Carlson, Eleanor Clift, David Frum, Al Hunt, etc.).

Charles
Krauthammer dropped out of the Top Ten after yesterday’s
column
criticizing Trent Lott. His spot was taken by Daniel Henninger, who jumps from tenth
to eighth after today’s pro-Bush
column. That means that the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion
Journal now has a remarkable seven of the top ten most partisan
columnists.

Before new pundits can be added to the 2003
roster, painful cuts must be made from this year’s Lying in
Ponds pundit team. After floundering about in search of the
proper criteria for inclusion (with helpful suggestions from readers),
we’re looking for pundits who:
1) are influential; (2) focus on national rather than
local or international issues; (3) focus on substance or ideology
rather than electoral politics; and (4) write regular, frequent columns
which are available online for free.

According to clubhouse rumors, here are the current
columnists who may be packing their bags soon:

• Bob Herbert - too local
• Nicholas Kristof - too international
• Thomas Friedman - too international
• Colbert King - too local
• David Ignatius - too international
• Fred Hiatt - too international
• Jackson Diehl - too international
• Jim Hoagland - too international
• Robert Kagan - too international, not enough columns
• Claudia Rosett - too international
• Dorothy Rabinowitz - not enough columns
• John Fund - too much electoral politics
• Kimberly Strassel - no columns since November 1st?
• Tunku Varadarajan - not political enough

Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan
sharply criticizes Peggy Noonan in a post
last week. Nyhan cites “two glaring errors” in Noonan’s
November 29 column. The OpinionJournal has since corrected the
two errors by revising the text of the online column.

Ben Fritz denounces
Al Gore’s recent “fifth column” comment and various “rhetorical cheap
shots” made by several pundits in response to Gore. Fritz criticizes Charles
Krauthammer for comments on “Fox News Sunday”, in which he
“half-jokingly accused Gore of mental illness”.

Finally, Bryan Keefer criticizes
several pundits, William Raspberry
among them, for “viscerally charged language”. Keefer cites
Mr. Raspberry for a “loaded attack” on Attorney General John Ashcroft
in his December
2 column; Mr. Raspberry criticized Ashcroft with vague comparisons
to the Taliban and Nazi Germany.

Well, things are almost back to normal here, but we won’t soon forget the ice storm which hit last Wednesday night. From about midnight until about 3 am, our
power flickered on and off as we heard the sound of transformers
popping somewhere in the neighborhood, accompanied by bright flashes.
Silas the One-Eyed Wonder Dog was shaking
like a leaf, certain that this was some new nightmarish sort of
thunderstorm. Finally the power stayed off for good as the freezing
rain came down steadily (over one inch in the Lying in Ponds rain gauge). The rest
of the night, we could hear limbs snapping and crashing down at regular
intervals. The worst were the many tall pines which bent over under
the weight of the ice until they snapped about halfway up.
Fortunately, our house wasn’t hit, only some fence damage as one pine
dropped onto our neighbors greenhouse (below). Fellow Triangle blogger Don McArthur has
some
photos too.

Sorry for the delay in
updating the site; the Raleigh area was hit with a historic
ice storm Wednesday night. We lost power for only about eight
hours, far less than most, school was cancelled for yesterday and
today, and our cable TV is not yet restored, which meant no blogging
from home. We had a lot of tree damage, but nothing hit the house so
we’re very thankful. I’m posting Thursday’s columns now, and will
catch up over the weekend.

After last week’s whimsical
column (his fourth non-political column in a row), Michael Kinsley dropped out of the the
Lying in Ponds Top Ten. That means that eight of the ten most
partisan columnists in the rankings are now Republicans, and six of the
eight write for the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.