Lying in Ponds

When I processed Cal
Thomas’ column yesterday, my Perl script put the title and author
name together to produce a somewhat startling first line:

European governments: Let starving Africans eat Cal Thomas

I’m taking off this morning for a short business trip to
upstate New York, so Wednesday’s and Thursday’s columns may be late. If
so, I’ll catch up at the end of the week.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had a
lot of trouble handling columns by Molly
Ivins and Robert Scheer.
Their columns appear on the Creators Syndicate
website, but they appear there a few days late, sometimes
without titles, and only the most recent three columns are accessible.
I’ve also been downloading Ms. Ivins’ columns from the Sacramento
Bee, but that wasn’t ideal either. This weekend I began using the
website of an organization called Working For
Change as the source for columns from Ms. Ivins and Mr. Scheer.
It appears to be a very useful collection of left-leaning columnists,
similar to the conservative TownHall.com.

Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity accuses columnist
Maureen Dowd of taking quotes from a George W. Bush speech “wildly out of context”, thereby initiating a
rapidly spreading media myth:

An outrageous new falsehood is circulating about President Bush. Last
week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush
statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is “not
a problem anymore,” and the distorted quotation has since been
repeated by MSNBC “Buchanan and Press” co-host Bill Press, CNN’s Miles
O’Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a
time when the New York Times is under fire for its conduct in the
Jayson Blair scandal, Dowd’s creation of an exploding media myth is
cause for serious concern.

Coincidentally, Mr. Nyhan just received
an award for earlier efforts to debunk another
well-traveled myth, that “the National Educational
Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on al-Qaida”. These
two stories, among dozens
of others, show why Spinsanity is so indispensable.

Pundit Robert Scheer’s most recent column, “Saving
Private Lynch: take 2“, has generated an explosive reaction in the
blogosphere. Glenn Reynolds weighed in with sharp
criticism and lots of related links (thanks again to Henry Hanks for pointing it out).
Glenn later pointed
to several posts on Stefan Sharkansky’s
Shark Blog — “Scheer
Gullibility“, the amazing “Robert
Scheer’s Canard-o-Matic“, and “Scheer
Scandal“. Here’s Mr. Sharkansky’s description of the
Canard-o-Matic:

Columnist Robert Scheer’s columns about Iraq all started to sound the
same after a while, so I did an exhaustive analysis of his
columns from the first few months of the year, and confirmed
that they simply recycle through the same old canards. It’s
almost as if Scheer has a machine that spits out random
combinations of canards each week. The table shows which
canards were used in which day’s column.
.
.

A couple of days ago I was wondering why
Mary McGrory had not written a column in two months. Thanks to
Michael Kurtz for pointing out that the Washington Post noted
a week ago that she has been ill. Lying in Ponds offers
best wishes to Ms. McGrory and hopes that she returns to health and
column-writing soon.

Eric Alterman deserves a lot of credit for
crossing a very wide ideological divide to defend
columnist John Fund in The Nation. Thanks to
Henry Hanks for the link.

It has now been over two months since award-winning
Washington Post columnist Mary
McGrory wrote her most
recent column, just before the war in Iraq began. On March 30th,
the Post put up a statement
that “Mary McGrory is away”.

In an article on Spinsanity (”Glib
Iraq comparisons continue“), Bryan Keefer criticizes pundits and
activists on the right and left, including our own Maureen Dowd, for unfairly comparing their
political enemies to the Fedayeen and other Iraqi villains:

Pundits and politicians have been leveraging the powerful emotional
associations of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other such figures
since soon after September 11. Such cheap, irrational attacks, most
of which link domestic political opponents with hated enemies, serve
only to undermine rational debate.

Noah Peters’ note from yesterday echoed a
point often made by admirers of Paul
Krugman — that his “partisan edge” is tolerable because of the value of
his serious, substantive analysis. Let me try an analogy to explain
why I disagree. Imagine a teacher with a class full of boys and
girls, who has a serious problem of showing favoritism toward the
boys. The teacher is continually critical of the girls while
overlooking the same faults in the boys. No matter how intelligent
or hard-working or inspirational the teacher may be, he surely could not be
considered to be a good teacher because of the fundamental nature of
his failure to educate all of his pupils to the best of his ability.

The New York Times explicitly proclaims itself to
be “an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, devoted to the public
welfare without regard to . . the claims of party politics . .”. Paul
Krugman has explicitly
rejected the notion that he is partisan. Yet in the 231 Krugman
columns I’ve evaluated dating back to the Clinton
administration, not a single one consists primarily of either substantive
praise of Republicans or criticism of Democrats. I would argue that
such a complete reduction of every issue to a simple partisan formula
is not a minor flaw but a fundamental failure of the independent analysis
to which the Times aspires. A truly independent analyst would
likely tilt towards one party or the other for legitimate ideological
reasons, but they would never be as predictable as Mr. Krugman. I
really miss Frank Rich.

Reader Noah Peters offers some
thoughtful criticism:

Coulter’s columns feel much more partisan than Krugman’s because she
is constantly making corrosive personal attacks as opposed to the
substantive reporting and analysis that Krugman offers, delivered of
course with a sharp partisan edge. Can you distinguish in your formula
between substantive criticism by Krugman and personal criticism by
Coulter? Also, Krugman does not offer much praise of the
Democrats–which you note in other rankings, but not in the overall
rankings. This must be factored in more in your rankings. For someone
like me who does not agree with either party it makes absolutely
no sense to rate Krugman as more partisan than Coulter when his
columns are far and away more substantive. I cannot take your website
seriously when I see something like that.

The first question keeps
coming up — I’m only trying to objectively measure partisanship,
not making a much broader judgement on which columnists
are the “best”. I believe that a lack of excessive partisanship is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for good punditry. A columnist
could be perfectly non-partisan, but uninformed, boring and
worthless. In the opposite case, Mr. Peters clearly believes that
“substantive reporting and analysis” is valuable, despite a
“sharp partisan edge”. I have some thoughts on that subject I’d like to
post in the next day or two.

Mr. Peters second question is also an ongoing
concern. My plan is to revise the methodology in the next month or
so to try to correct for what I consider a bias against Democratic
pundits in the rankings caused by Republican control of both the White
House and Congress. Having said that, although Mr. Krugman’s
mention of Democrats is infrequent, he has been very favorable toward
them (32 positive and only 4 negative Democratic references this
year). That is taken into account in the overall rankings, and a
change in methodology likely wouldn’t improve his score very much.

Each of the top three Lying in Ponds
columnists has their own web site — Robert
Scheer, Paul
Krugman and Ann Coulter.
Mr. Scheer’s web site has a
biography, links to an extensive
archive of his columns, and allows one to join a mailing
list. When signing up for the mailing list, one has to choose
“Just Bob’s weekly column, please” or “The weekly column, plus
anything Bob thinks I ought to see”.

A couple of weeks ago, I criticized Donald Luskin for
his personal attacks on Paul Krugman. In
a post
on his weblog last week, Mr. Luskin made yet another juvenile
reference to Mr. Krugman’s height, and noted that Mr. Krugman has
slipped to second in the partisanship rankings this year:

And while we’re on the subject, I take some personal satisfaction in
the fact that Krugman has slipped to the number two most partisan
pundit of 2003 in the ratings on Lying in Ponds (that unusual name
is drawn from a line in Holy Grail). Maybe our work here and on
National Review Online really is reining Krugman in a bit. So perhaps
a better cinematic allusion would actually be Get Shorty. Looks like
we got him good.

Actually, Mr. Krugman’s anti-Republican screed stream has continued
unabated, but the addition of new pundits in 2003 includes at least
two who have been able to crank out similarly predictable partisan
commentary so far — Robert Scheer and Ann Coulter.

After yesterday’s anti-John
Kerry screed (36 negative Democratic references), Ann Coulter had moved to within one point
of last year’s champion, Paul
Krugman (then Mr. Krugman’s column
today widened the gap a little). And that’s without a change
to the methodology to correct
for party imbalance, which would probably lift Ms. Coulter’s
partisanship score above both Mr. Krugman and Robert Scheer. I still need to decide on a
correction method and implement it.