Lying in Ponds

Spinsanity has developed
a thick
dossier of criticism of Ann
Coulter over the past two years. In
an article last week, Bryan Keefer takes
Ms. Coulter and Andrew Sullivan to task for what he considers to
be their “inflammatory” attacks on media coverage of the war in Iraq, saying
that they “cross the line when they suggest that organizations whose
coverage they disagree with are pro-Saddam”:

In the past few days, pundits Andrew Sullivan and Ann Coulter have
pioneered a disingenuous attack on the media, suggesting that any
reporting that is skeptical about or critical of American conduct or
progress in the war in Iraq amounts to support for Saddam Hussein.

While Coulter and Sullivan focus on different targets (the New York
Times and the British Broadcasting Company, respectively), their
arguments are strikingly similar. Both invent dark pro-Saddam
motivations and absurdly ascribe them to entire media institutions -
Sullivan goes so far as to suggest that the BBC is trying to “make the
war more bloody” - based upon a series of suspect assertions and leaps
of logic. It’s fine to criticize media outlets for being unreasonably
critical of the US in their news reporting, but to attack them as
enemy sympathizers in wartime for such coverage is extremely
inflammatory.

Bob English posed the original question which led to
yesterday’s post on the issue of motivation. Mr. English responds:

Motivation is not important. There is, however, a difference
between the acts of critics and partisans and a reasonable metric
should take that into account.

Administration critics, for example, may find a great deal to
criticize about the administration. They may feel that those
criticisms are more important than any mention of administration
policies they agree with. It is more important, after all, to
change dangerous policies than to applaud reasonable ones. A
columnist who perceives a host of dangerous policies but spends
time looking for reasonable policies to applaud in the name of
balance might even be deemed irresponsible.

Partisans, however, combine criticism of one party with praise for
the other. They aim not to change the policies of one party, but
to promote the other as an alternative. They might, for example,
attack the policies and positions of those who aren’t in power
while praising the policies of those in power in nearly equal
measure, acts which have little bearing on actual policy directions
(they merely applaud policies already in action and criticize
policies that lacked political force) but which do attempt to
increase the stature of those in power, exactly the type of act
you’re trying to identify when you decry the transformation of
journalism into advertising.

I’ll follow up with my own thoughts next week.

A couple of weeks ago we asked whether
a columnist has to adhere to
their own party (by praising it or its members) to be considered
truly partisan. I think that one component of that question is whether
a person must actually have partisan motives to be considered
partisan. My answer is no — none of us can discern another person’s true
motivations. But we can examine words and actions and try to
determine if they are consistent with a partisan motivation (if it
walks like a duck . .).

When Lying in Ponds first got a
little attention in May of last year, I received a very kind e-mail
from Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity, in which he said this
about their approach: “. . we try not to speculate as to
people’s intentions — this is the hallmark of much of the jargon we
criticize.” I was very impressed by that (as I am by
everything Spinsanity does), and have tried to follow his
advice.

Does it mean anything that five of
the ten most partisan pundits so far (Robert Scheer, Ann Coulter, Molly Ivins, Mona
Charen and Cal Thomas) are from
the batch of syndicated columnists which were added this year? Since I
tried to pick a selection of the most popular syndicated columnists, I
suspect it just reflects the unfortunate fact that taking outrageously
one-sided positions is an almost-guaranteed route to popularity.
Polarization tends to generate attention — both love and hatred in
large quantities.

We had a wonderful time in
Florida (highlight: Cards-Braves in Orlando, Morris, Maddux, Ankiel,
Smoltz, Pujols, A. Jones, et al.),
but it was not a great week for telecommunication. I had a lot of
trouble finding an Earthlink access number for Kissimmee, so I fell
way behind and had to make a couple of trips to an Internet cafe.
Then my cell phone was disabled by water when my wife was soaked on
the “Journey to Atlantis” ride at Sea World. Anyway, I think the
columns are now up-to-date and things should be back to normal this
week.

Today is the day that the fully-loaded Lying in
Ponds minivan heads southward for a long-awaited spring break
trip to Florida, where we’ll do whatever it is that families do in
Orlando. I’ll try to endure it stoically, comforted by the prospect
of a spring training game and catching up on some sleep. I expect to
post daily boxscores next week, but on an erratic schedule and probably
without comments.

Does criticism of
the other party by itself count as partisanship, or is praise
of your own party a necessary component? That’s the gist of
an interesting e-mail from reader Bob English. I think it’s a difficult
and important question, so I’ll just post his note today and leave a
discussion of the subject for a future date.

I’m sure you spend lots of time thinking about the meaning of
partisanship. The definition you use on your page describes it as
adherence to a party or faction. I wonder, therefore, whether it
is truly possible for someone to be a partisan without exhibiting
such adherence. Extreme Libertarians, after all, might be highly
critical of the Bush administration, but that wouldn’t make them
Democratic partisans.

I bring this up because I continue to find Krugman’s ratings
fascinating. He clearly despises the Bush administration and its
policies, but it’s difficult to see much preference in his columns for
the Democratic alternative. Indeed, his 2003 score is based on 155
Republican references but only 3 Democratic ones, all from the same
article, one a reference to Clinton that’s hard to read as a comment
on Clinton at all. In 13 of 14 articles, he mentions Democrats only
in passing. That certainly qualifies him as a harsh administration
critic, but it’s hard to see how that qualifies him as an adherent.

To put it another way, if your point is to identify adherents, to
identify those who turn journalism into advertising, a necessary
factor would have to be approval of one party. It shouldn’t be
possible for someone to score more than 50% by writing solely about
one party. It also shouldn’t be possible for a few chance references
to one party to have the same effect on an overall score as 150
references to the other.

To make the contrast clear, you say that Coulter moved into a near tie
with Krugman. If you look at Coulter’s numbers, however, you see that
while she spends as much time bashing the Democrats as Krugman does
the administration, she also devotes substantial portions of her
columns to praising Republicans. That has to mean something.

For the first time in the one year
history of Lying in Ponds, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has slipped out of the top
spot in the partisanship rankings. His column
today contains one positive and only five negative Republican
references, which drops his 2003 score enough to fall behind both Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer.

Salon
columnist Andrew Sullivan accuses
(link requires registration or “day pass”) columnist Mary McGrory of changing her
mind on Iraq because she had “offended her loyal left-liberal
readership”:

This must be one of the most astonishing admissions by an opinion
journalist in a very long time. She is not, she tells us, a
free-thinker, trying to make sense of the world around her as best she
can. She isn’t a writer devoted to her own principles and applying
them to the chaotic scene of world politics. She is a political hack
with a constituency she has to please. Deviation from giving her
“base” what it wants is “failure” in her journalism. It’s useful, I
guess, to see the real motives behind someone claiming to be a
writer. But McGrory has just declared that she isn’t a writer — she
is in fact the antithesis of one: an apparatchik, a phony and a
propagandist.

The two McGrory columns referred to are I’m
Persuaded and To
My Very Persuasive Readers.

In a column on the legal website FindLaw, columnist Edward Lazarus
accuses (link via Joe Conason) columnist George Will of flip-flopping on
the constitutionality of a Senate fillibuster, pointing to Mr. Will’s
recent
column on the Miguel Estrada nomination:

The flip-flop is an embarrassment to Will and his reputation. Sadly,
it may also be more than that as well. I fear that Will’s adventure in
hypocrisy is emblematic of what may well be the worst truth in
American political discourse: nothing is shameful anymore. And no
sense of integrity - an integrity that transcends politics - remains.

After today’s extremely
partisan column, syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has pulled into a virtual tie
with Paul Krugman, who has been the
Lying in Ponds titan of partisanship since the site began in
May of last year. Mr. Krugman is now ahead by only a fraction of a point
(76.2 to 76.0).

A couple of days ago I proposed
a another way to revise the Partisanship Index (PI). Below is a
comparison of the final 2002 results with the current and
proposed methods:

It generally lowers Democratic scores and raises Republican scores
by a few points. The biggest change is that it drops Frank Rich’s
score by 15 points, lowering him from 8th place to 19th.

One of Spinsanity’s greatest strengths
is that they are persistent in fighting against long-lived
media myths, such as the myth that Kenneth Lay slept in the Lincoln
Bedroom during the Clinton administration. In an article last week,
Brendan Nyhan criticizes
recent resurfacings of another oldie-but-goodie:

Since it was first created by syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, the
myth that the Bush administration “gave” $43 million to Afghanistan’s
Taliban regime in 2001 has circled the globe and circulated throughout
the mainstream media in the US. Even after myriad attempts to correct
the record, this pervasive bit of disinformation refuses to die.

As we have noted many times, President Bush granted $43 million in
food aid and food security programs to relieve an impending famine in
Afghanistan in May 2001, continuing an aid program initiated by
President Clinton. The programs were administered directly by the
United Nations and NGOs, bypassing the regime.

Scheer’s June 2001 column, however, claimed that this constituted a
“gift of $43 million” to the Taliban while never once mentioning the
famine in the country or that the “gift” was food aid that bypassed
the regime. Scheer’s distortion has set off a series of echoes that
shows no signs of fading.

On the outstanding Spinsanity topics page, Mr. Scheer
has his own
section, along with other Lying in Ponds columnists Ann Coulter, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Michael Kelly.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to
find a better way to calculate the Partisanship Index (PI), one which
will reduce the suspected elevation of Democratic scores caused
by the greater opportunities naturally present during a Republican
administration. First I proposed equally weighting a
columnist’s treatment of Democrats and Republicans. But a reader suggested that when a
columnist chooses to talk far more about one party than the other,
it’s significant and should be somehow taken into account by the
scoring system. I agree, so I’m proposing a way to adjust the
calculation of PI to “normalize” a pundit’s party balance. My idea is
to estimate the imbalance in party references that would be
legitimately caused by the fact that one party controls more of the
levers of government.

To estimate that imbalance for 2002, I added up all of the party
references (positive, negative and neutral) from all of the 37
pundits. With George W. Bush in the White House, the pundits
mentioned Republicans more than Democrats by a 62/38 ratio. So if a
columnist wrote about the parties in that same proportion, it wouldn’t
be fair to let their final score depend more heavily on their
treatment of Republicans. To avoid that, I’m proposing that an
adjustment of 12 percentage points should be added to each
Democratic weight and subtracted from each Republican weight. The
equation for PI would then be:

 PI = 100 * [(Df+Dadj)*DI - (Rf+Radj)*RI]
 

where DI and RI are the Democratic Index and Republican Index, and Df
and Rf are each party’s fraction of the total references:

           Dt                Rt
 Df =  --------- , Rf =  ---------
       (Dt + Rt)         (Dt + Rt)
 

Dadj and Radj are the adjustments necessary to correct the
imbalance of references caused by the imbalance of political power. For
2002, Dadj would be +0.12 and Radj would be -0.12. If a
columnist chooses to overemphasize one party or the other, then their
scores will reflect that even after the adjustment. The table below
shows the ratio of party references for each of the 2002 Top Ten
pundits and their ratio after the 62/38 normalization is made.

You can see that even after the adjustment, columnists like Paul
Krugman would have scores which depend more heavily on their (negative)
treatment of Republicans, while columnists like Michael Kelly would
have scores which depend more heavily on their (negative) treatment of
Democrats.