Lying in Ponds

The Oregonian has dropped
syndicated columnist Arianna
Huffington from their Op-Ed page because “She has
dragged herself across the line from being a commentator to being an
activist . . . . She loses the status of sideline observer.” The
issue is her recent involvement in an anti-SUV campaign. Thanks to Henry
Hanks for the link.

The always-excellent Andrew
Cline criticizes columns by first Peggy
Noonan and then Michael
Kinseley for “poor rhetorical theorizing”. And
this
from Andrew makes me ready to go back to college:

A warning to students attending, or thinking of attending, Park
University: If you take my rhetoric class, prepare to be challenged. I
don’t care what your beliefs are. You go right, I go left. You go
left, I go right. You go some other direction, and I’ll find its
opposite and go that way. I will do all that I can to shake up your
world view, to get you to question your values, your
knowledge–everything you’ve been taught so far. That, dear student,
is one huge part of what education is all about. That’s also a big
clue about why there are so many liberals in the humanities and social
sciences. Shaking up world views, questioning authority and received
wisdom, is not a (classically) conservative endeavor.

Lying in Ponds has criticized WSJ
OpinionJournal columnist Collin
Levey because she didn’t make a single positive Democratic
reference in 2002. In today’s column, she breaks
through:

In the Ninth Circuit, Carter appointee Stephen Reinhardt returned to
an earlier antigun opinion and deleted references to the work of
Michael Bellesiles, the historian whose Bancroft Prize was revoked
because of serious questions about the honesty of his scholarship.

Granted, it’s pretty weak (many are; that’s why it’s so difficult to
avoid positive references to the other party!), but Ms. Levey commends
the action of a judge who she identifies as a “Carter appointee”.
Humorously, this one column vaults Ms. Levey into second place with a
Democratic partisanship score. This just shows that the
rankings don’t mean much until a few months of columns have
accumulated.

After this year’s roster was decided, two
pundits had their columns discontinued — Thomas Bray of the WSJ
OpinionJournal and Frank Rich of the New York Times.
As a result, I’m going to add a few additional columnists. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has
already been added, and I’m considering others like Derek Z. Jackson,
Rich Lowry and Arianna Huffington.

Tune in Monday when the 2003 statistics
will be displayed for the first time, replacing the final 2002
results.

Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity
criticizes
the Wall Street Journal editorial page on the
University of Michigan affirmative action case, concluding with:

A good editorial informs in the course of making a forceful
argument. Unfortunately, the Journal is often all too willing to
dispense with such niceties.

Spinsanity’s critique was softened by their subsequent
correction of “two major errors” in the original post.

Howard Kurtz writes a characteristically balanced
profile of Paul Krugman in
yesterday’s Washington Post. I had to chuckle when I read this
paragraph:

Krugman vows to be more careful, but adds: “I’m under much more
scrutiny than any other opinion columnist. There are people who spend
remarkable amounts of time monitoring me and looking for any possible
deviation.”

Just for the record, I spend a lot of time on this site discussing
Mr. Krugman, but only because he has dominated the rankings and
because so much of my e-mail concerns him (both pro and con). He’s
one of over 30 pundits being evaluated, and I’d frankly rather spend
more time on some of the others.

Some readers have asked about columnists who use
nicknames to refer to political figures. My general approach has been
reluctance to add anything more than necessary to the lists of
partisan names. I checked last year’s columns for the use of
“Dubya”, but found that it was used by only three columnists,
surprisingly most often by Peggy Noonan
(9 occurrences). Maureen Dowd probably
uses nicknames the most frequently (”W.”, “Rummy”, “Poppy”, etc.). If a
columnist were to consistently use nicknames in either a negative or postive
partisan way, it could affect the results. I’m not enthusiastic about
cluttering up the lists with nicknames, but I would do it
if convinced that it was necessary.

Tapped and Mickey Kaus have been
going back and forth lately on the subject of Paul Krugman. Tapped defended
Mr. Krugman, acknowledging that he is “occasionally shrill and
over-the-top”, but “far, far from the most shrill, over-the-top
columnist in America.” Mr. Kaus considered that a
“half-hearted defense”. Then Tapped tweaked
Mr. Kaus for ignoring their challenge to compare Mr. Krugman to Michael Kelly:

Our point, obviously, is: In the pantheon of columnists who sometimes
tend to the shrill, Krugman is a piker. He’s not in the same league as
the dozens of conservative columnists littering America’s op-ed
pages. And by Tapped’s lights he’s not even in the same galaxy as
Kelly. Kelly is the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner of Kaus’
Los Angeles living room whenever the Slate blogger is typing up
another post about Krugman losing his cool. Why are Krugman’s attacks
on Bush worthy of ridicule, but Kelly’s attacks on Al Gore not even
worthy of mention? Stop ducking the question, Mickey.

Having slogged through every single shrill, over-the-top Kelly and
Krugman column in 2002, I feel qualified to add my two cents.
Assuming that shrillness is somewhat correlated with partisanship, I
could make a case that Mr. Krugman’s 2002 one-note
performances
put him far ahead of Mr. Kelly, who is himself unmistakably partisan
(will Mickey respond?).
But since I’ve said all along that Democratic partisans like Mr. Krugman
will naturally have elevated partisanship scores during a
controversial Republican administration, I don’t think that one year
of material
is enough to decide which of the two 800-pound gorillas is more shrill or
partisan. But I do think that they’re unquestionably in the same
league of shrillness. To both Tapped and Mr. Kaus, I would
gently suggest that the shrill voice across the ideological street
somehow seems more irritating than the one in your own living
room.

It’s great to see the guys at
Spinsanity active again after a long holiday break. In an
article posted yesterday, Ben Fritz discusses the use of the phrase
“class
warfare“.

I was very disappointed to read (via Eric
Alterman) that Lying in Ponds favorite Frank Rich is soon to be promoted and
switched to the Arts & Leisure page, and will therefore give
up his Op-Ed position after a final column this Saturday. I’ve cited
Mr. Rich repeatedly as the example of a columnist who is sharply
ideological and can regularly rake the other party over the coals while
retaining the intellectual independence to vigorously criticize his
own party when he deems it necessary.

Jack Shafer at Slate
salutes
Washington Post columnist Colbert I.
King in an article last week:

I salute King not because he’s the most artful writer in the business
or even the brainiest, but because he possesses the most relentless
voice I’ve encountered in a daily newspaper since alcohol dimmed Mike
Royko’s and death extinguished it. He’s a winning example of what
editors (and writers) could do with the op-ed form if they drew on
their passion now and again. King takes names. He names names. And he
calls people names.

Last year’s results showed that Mr. King was certainly no
partisan. His score suggested that he leans Republican, but that’s
because his local columns regularly criticized D.C. mayor Anthony
Williams (and ex-mayor Marion Barry), and because of a single column
with a remarkable 36 negative references to Senator Robert Byrd. I
dropped him from the active list for 2003 along with other local or
international columnists, opting instead for an “apples and apples”
comparison between a wider cross-section of columnists who focus on
domestic issues and politics.

Jack O’Toole at Political
Professional offered some thoughtful criticism in a post last
Monday. Mr. O’Toole makes two main points. First, he’s
concerned about methodology:

Like most people, I’ve always had reservations about studies that are
more interested in counting than context. That’s how one media
watchdog group managed to name Saving Private Ryan the most violent
movie of 1998, and another wound up arguing that a popular sitcom was
among television’s most violent programs — based almost entirely on a
single fantasy episode in which the lead characters played the roles
of The Three Stooges. These results were generated using essentially
the same methodology as that employed by LIP, and demonstrate the
weaknesses inherent in this type of study.

I agree that the Lying in Ponds method is simple, and that
the results should be viewed with caution. But the examples cited
above seem to be a result of either a small sample size or an
anomalous data point. I’ve previously noted those issues in
connection with Collin
Levey and Colbert
King. I average together two different methods which combine the
partisanship scores from individual columns into a final score to try
to minimize those potential problems — it was reassuring that the top
three were identical with either method (Total PI
and Median PI).

Second, Mr. O’Toole argues that Paul
Krugman’s score is inflated because of his subject matter:

Paul Krugman’s column is about economics. He disagrees with the
dominant wing of the Republican party on economic issues. As a result,
he’s inevitably going to “win” any simple numbers game like Lying in
Ponds’ — just as, say, Pat Robertson would if he were hired by a
major newspaper to write on abortion policy twice a week. Of course,
Krugman could improve his scores dramatically by inserting the phrase
Unlike high-minded Republicans such as John McCain from time to time,
but that fact merely demonstrates just how flawed the LIP methodology
really is.

It’s a plausible hypothesis, but one that doesn’t hold up under
inspection. Mr. Krugman wrote many columns on non-economic topics in
2002, and they’re just as partisan as the economics columns.
There was an anti-Republican screed on the church
and state issue, an anti-Republican screed on Trent
Lott, an anti-Republican screed on climate
policy, an anti-Republican screed on forest
policy, an anti-Republican screed on drilling
in Alaska, an anti-Republican screed on French
elections (huh?), and many more. Have you detected a pattern? It’s
really necessary to go to the Paul Krugman
page and scroll down through the column statistics to get a
feeling for the remarkable consistency. While it’s right to have a
healthy skepticism about counting methods such as this one, I believe
that the basis for Mr. Krugman’s 2002 partisanship score is extremely
solid, suffering from neither small sample size (99 columns) nor
by the effect of anomalous data points.

TBOGG
thinks Lying in Ponds should include synidcated columnists:

…and wouldn’t you just know it that Paul Krugman came out on top as
the most partisan of all columnists. Not Michael Kelly or Bob
Bartley. Of course he only reviewed the The Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, and New York Times. Not that conservatives like
Andrew Sullivan will point this out when refering to the
rankings. This implies that Krugman is somehow more partisan than
columnists like Ann Coulter, Rich Lowry, or Cal Thomas, who don’t
write for those publications, but are syndicated.

Seems dishonest doesn’t it? And dishonesty is so hard to quantify…

Coulter and Thomas, of course, are among the new pundits being
evaluated this year. By the end of the month I’ll start showing the
2003 results on the right side of the page.