Lying in Ponds

Last week, the blogger Demosthenes commented on the discussion (”nasty little blogwar”?) between Pandagon and Lying in Ponds on the definition of partisanship. While Demosthenes sees some merit in my attempt to distinguish between partisanship and ideology, he takes a much dimmer view of my treatment of Paul Krugman:

That being said, Lying in Ponds completely out to lunch on Paul Krugman; Krugman devastated the whole “partisanship” argument ages ago, driving a stake deep into the heart of LiP’s methology that it has never truly recovered from. LiP’s supposedly “quantitative” measurement of partisanship is entirely robbed of context, rendering it utterly useless, as (as Krugman noted) a supposed “partisan” could be an honest critic of a dishonest target. Partisanship isn’t necessary for this and, because of this, is entirely unprovable by LiP’s methodology. As the entire point of the exercise is to measure partisanship, it’s rendered pointless, useless, and highly deceptive.

In the comments to that post, Demosthenes carries on the discussion with Markus, who had previously offered his opinion about Lying in Ponds on his own Dormouse Dreaming weblog (scroll down). Demosthenes reiterates the point that “Bush is a natural target because he’s the president, and LiP ignores that aspect of Krugman’s critique of his methods . .”. Since that hypothesis comes up so frequently, I thought it would be useful to delve into it — we can try to remove Mr. Krugman’s treatment of George W. Bush from the data and see how that would change his partisanship score.

I’ll be looking only at the Total Partisanship Index, which makes up half of the final Combined Partisanship Index, because recalculating the other half, the Median Partisanship Index is a lot more difficult, and shouldn’t change the results much. The results are shown in the table below. If one removes every direct Bush reference from consideration (”Bush”, “Bush administration”, “George W. Bush”, “President Bush”, “George Bush”, “Bushies”, etc.), there still would be enough remaining negative references to the “administration”, Dick Cheney, etc. so that Mr. Krugman’s total partisanship score would drop only from 74 to 73, second only to Ann Coulter out of our 32 active pundits.

Well, what if we also remove all administration references which don’t include the Bush name directly, such as “administration”, “White House”, “the president”, and other members of the administration such as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? Even then, there would be enough remaining negative references to Tom DeLay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and generic references to “Republicans” so that Mr. Krugman’s score would drop only to 53, still good enough for 8th place behind Mona Charen. In fact, even if every single Republican reference of any kind is ignored in Mr. Krugman’s 2003 columns, his favorable treatment of Democrats alone would make his score 54, again earning him 8th place in total partisanship among the 32 active pundits!

I’m a little surprised that Krugman fans such as Demosthenes don’t take an approach closer to that of Markus — sure, Paul Krugman may be partisan but he’s also a brilliant economist, he’s “the most important political columnist in America“, etc. Instead, they continue to try various theories (Krugman is simply being critical of the party in power, he simply disagrees with the Republicans on economics, etc.) which don’t stand up at all if one takes the time to systematically examine the complete set of columns over several years (which is the point of Lying in Ponds). As the above analysis clearly shows, Paul Krugman is not merely hostile to George W. Bush or to the Bush administration. Over the 250 columns analyzed so far, not a single one has consisted mainly of praise, however tepid, for any Republicans, and not a single one has consisted mainly of criticism, however gentle, for any Democrats. Perhaps one or two contrary columns will appear as the debate between Democratic presidential candidates heats up later this year, but I don’t see how one can avoid the conclusion that Paul Krugman is an extremely partisan columnist, regardless of how much one admires his views and shares his enemies.

Today’s Ann Coulter column, “Liberal arguments: Still a quagmire” is the first one in which “liberal” and “liberals” are being tagged and evaluated as possible partisan Democratic words. As those words constitute 13 out of the 19 negative Democratic references, they raise the Partisanship Index for that column from 94 to 97.

Reader Michael Kurtz has periodically found it necessary to remind me that the Wall Street Journal and its OpinionJournal.com website are not the same thing. A couple of weeks ago he tried again to keep me straight on that point when I discussed the Michael Tomasky report:

Concerning the comparison of LIP’s results for WSJ vs NYT with Tomasky you
should note that LIP does not measure the WSJ editorial page in any way.
While the NYT has a number of regular columnists which LIP follows, the
WSJ is not arranged the same way. For example yesterday the WSJ had 4
opinion pieces, one by a regular columnist. LIP did not evaluate any of
these, Rosett, the (now inactive) LIP writer was only on the Opinion
Journal web page, not in the paper itself. Likewise today the WSJ has 4
opinion pieces, one by a regular columnist; the LIP (inactive again)
columnist, Fund, is again not in the actual paper, but is on the OJ page.

Only two of the columnists listed by the WSJ as columnists are covered by
LIP (Henninger and Bartley), all the others are OJ columnists, who
sometimes get their stuff into the main paper, but not usually. The WSJ
columnists who cover politics are: Bartley, Gonzalez, Harwood & Seib,
Henninger, Hunt, Jenkins, Kempe, Melloan, Murray, Restall, and Wessel.

He’s right of course. Since I track only columnists which are accessible on the OpinionJournal.com site, I need to remember to stress the distinction between the OpinionJournal.com and the actual WSJ, and that the difference is more extensive than just the omission of Al Hunt.

After a California recall column yesterday, Robert Scheer’s partisanship score dropped slightly, and he slipped into third place in the rankings, just behind Paul Krugman. Although Mr. Scheer’s column strongly supported Cruz Bustamante and criticized Arnold Schwarzenegger, he made several positive references to Ronald Reagan’s performance as governor, praising his knowledge of state government and willingness to raise taxes.

Yesterday I burdened you with the dreaded baseball batting average/partisanship index analogy. Today I’ll try out a new one, by comparing the partisanship index to the blood cholesterol level. Total blood cholesterol levels below 180 mg/dl are considered “ideal”, values between 180 and 199 are “acceptable”, values between 200 and 219 are “borderline high”, and values of 220 or higher are considered “too high”. I assume that a value of zero is impossible, and that no one would argue that the mere measurement of blood cholesterol implies that the presence of any cholesterol at all is bad.

Yet that’s the kind of objection I frequently encounter when attempting to measure partisanship (see yesterday’s discussion). I expect most pundits to systematically favor one party over the other for ideological reasons — there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But when the partisanship index gets very high, it suggests that a columnist is not truly offering independent views. As with cholesterol levels, the difference between normal and excessive partisanship is certainly debatable. But my hope is that the partisanship index as calculated here is solid enough to highlight the obvious partisanship of those pundits who write 250 columns without crossing party lines, or who wish a violent death for their political opponents.

[permanent link]

While crediting Richard Eriksson for a good suggestion yesterday, I forgot to provide a link to his website.

A weblog called Sadly, no! has offered some thoughtful criticism of Lying in Ponds. Part of the criticism seems to be that the methods used here are not hard enough on Ann Coulter, although oddly there was no mention of the fact that Ms. Coulter currently has the highest partisanship score. Here are a few of the points raised by Sadly, no! and brief responses.

1. Most people (especially those who write opinion pieces — or have blogs) are going to be (at least) moderate partisans. They’ll support a given party, and/or a general set of policy preferences, certain levels and types of government intervention, etc. Expecting them to do anything else seems a bit foolish and pointless.

   I encounter this same question again and again; the answer is in the site summary quoted in Sadly, no!’s post: “Lying in Ponds tries to draw a fundamental distinction between ordinary party preference and excessive partisanship.” I also expect pundits to be moderate partisans, but I’m trying to highlight those who go far beyond that.

2. A more useful index would be not a partisan one, but a hack index: to what extent do columnists stretch the truth, make things up or repeat long discredited falsehoods in the elaboration of their arguments?

   Here’s what I said a week ago: “Lying in Ponds is focused on the issue of partisanship. My view is that partisanship may lead a columnist to employ ‘irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions’ (see Spinsanity on Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer), or it may lead a columnist to carefully omit any perspective or inconvenient facts which contradict their own partisan worldview (’accurate’, but full of half-truths). I think the former is worse than the latter, but both make rational political decision-making more difficult by contributing another source of distortion rather than illumination to the political debate.”

3. The word “liberals” isn’t flagged by LIP, but is (routinely) used by Coulter to refer to Democrats, on the assumption that the proportion of people who view liberals as inherently suspicious is much greater than those who think the same of Democrats.

   That’s a good point; I’ve discussed it recently here. The problem was minor until I added Ann Coulter this year; but with her heavy use of “liberals” it’s now a bigger problem. So beginning today I will tag the words “liberal” and “conservative” and evaluate each occurrence to see if it is being used a synonym for “Democrat” and “Republican”.

4. I really don’t understand the criticism of the evaluation of the references to Senators Hutchinson and Kassebaum as negative in this Coulter passage:
   

   After a lifetime of honorable service to his country, Adm. Kelso was barely permitted to retire with four stars, in a 54-43 Senate vote. A majority of Democrats opposed Kelso, along with all the Republican women in the Senate — Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Arlen Specter, Bob Packwood and so on.

   Ms. Coulter is strongly supporting Admiral Kelso in the column, thus she is criticizing all four Republicans who voted against him, with an extra dig at Specter and Packwood.

5. Wouldn’t that make the sentence “When Al Gore lost the election to George Bush in 2000″ a double partisan reference? (Democrat/Negative, Republican/Positive.) If so — what is the meaning of such an exercise? When even the most neutral statements of facts are viewed through the prism of partisanship it indicates not an excessive partisanship, but an excessive willingness to characterize all debate (and hence discredit) as being excessively partisan.

   I think this goes to the heart of Sadly, no!’s misunderstanding of the approach. Yes, “Al Gore” would be evaluated as a negative Democratic reference and “George Bush” would be evaluated as a positive Republican reference. But no, that doesn’t mean that the statement is being characterized as excessively partisan. The partisanship scores presented on Lying in Ponds depend on hundreds of references over dozens of columns. A partisan Republican columnist could easily write columns filled with negative statements about the Clinton administration, leaving out any counterbalancing positive information or perspective. Even if they were careful to be entirely factual with their one-sided presentation, wouldn’t that be evidence of partisanship?

Individual references, or even single paragraphs or columns may be quite misleading, but my premise is that when large sets of columns over many months or years are evaluated this way, excessive partisanship becomes apparent. My favorite analogy is the batting average in baseball. A player might get three hits in a game, but all of them “cheap” (infield hit, bloop single, a hit that should have been scored an error). In that case, the batting average for that one game would be very misleading, but over a sufficient number of at-bats it should be meaningful because the cheap hits and line-drive outs tend to cancel each other out, leaving a reasonable measure of hitting performance. In the same way, Ann Coulter will write some columns where she criticizes Republicans here and there, and others where she may state something mildly positive about Democrats. I’ve already marveled at the difficulty of quantifying Ms. Coulter’s off-the-charts negativity, but over 34 columns so far this year, her partisanship is unmistakable, clearly indicated by her number one ranking in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.

Thanks to Richard Eriksson and Just One Minute’s Thomas Maguire for suggesting the same way to query Technorati — using the entire URL for the column as the search string, like this. That brings up 15 links to the Coulter column in question, two of them from Lying in Ponds, and some of them which do not mention Ms. Coulter’s wish for “friendly fire”. So there’s a little outrage but nothing that I can see from the national media. Maybe Rhetorica’s Andrew Cline is on the right track:

On the contrary…the fact that no one is reacting to Ann Coulter’s latest outrage may be proof that fewer people are now taking her seriously. The only reason to get upset about the ravings of a harridan is if her ravings are taken seriously. We may be seeing the final realization that Ann Coulter is nothing but our village idiot, albeit an entertaining one.

I still don’t understand why Ann Coulter’s latest outrage — actually wishing that Al Gore and Gray Davis had been killed in Vietnam — has not generated a national reaction. Am I not looking at the correct websites, or are we just jaded, suffering from Coulter Shock?

Sometimes you jump the shark; sometimes the shark jumps you. Stefan Sharkansky jumped on Robert Scheer the other day, accusing him of hypocrisy on property taxes in a recent column (link from Henry Hanks and Glenn Reynolds). Mr. Scheer gets a better reception from Mickey Kaus: “Give LAT columnist Robert Scheer points–he’s willing to dis his friend Arianna Huffington.”

Pandagon continues to argue that the negative connotation of the word partisanship “isn’t intrinsic to the word”, but is something that conservatives have added to “slander the (generally non-conservative) opposition with.” I agree that words like “liberal” and “French” have been victimized, but Pandagon is simply wrong about “partisanship”. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary:

Partisanship
The state, condition, or practice of a partisan; zealous or blind support of one’s party.

1831 CARLYLE Sart. Res. III. i, Not out of blind sectarian partisanship. 1867 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. I. iv. 268 The frenzy of religious partizanship.

Partisanship can be practiced on the behalf of a political party, ideology, religion, etc., but the negative connotation of the word goes back to at least the 19th century and Thomas Carlyle, unless one believes that devious Republicans have infiltrated the Oxford English Dictionary.

Pandagon disagrees strongly with Lying in Pond’s attempts to make a distinction between partisanship and ideology:

How do you have a site that ranks “partisanship” without knowing what partisanship is? Partisanship is the fervent belief in and promotion of an ideology, so one would actually be more inclined to be partisan on an ideological level. Nor is “partisanship” a good or bad thing on balance.

Partisanship is a word that’s being defined right out of existence, thanks in no small part to efforts like this. It’s come to mean “not agreeing with me”, on both sides of the aisle. Democrats who disagreed with Bush on the war were being “partisan”. After September 11th, we were supposed to transcend ideology (and therefore partisanship). All partisan means is that I have a strongly held set of beliefs. Chances are, if you’re talking about politics, you’re a partisan for one thing or another. If we didn’t have partisans, there would be no informed political debate.

Partisanship only has to do with the fervor of belief in one’s held values. Complaints of “partisanship” are actually not about partisanship at all, but rather tone, meaning, attitude and the like. “Partisan”, like “liberal”, has been turned into the naughty political word du jour, to the point where people simply don’t know what it means anymore. It’s Luskinitis.

Pandagon has been similarly dismissive once before. First, I agree completely that partisanship does not mean “not agreeing with me”; that’s exactly the kind of thing that this site is trying to combat. It seems that Pandagon is insisting on its own narrow definition of partisanship in place of the one found in any dictionary. One definition is permanently affixed to the site summary (top right corner of the main page); here’s another from the Webster’s New World Dictionary on my bookshelf:

partisan: a person who takes the part of or strongly supports one side, party or person; often specif., an unreasoning, emotional adherent.

Clearly, Pandagon’s concept of partisanship (fervent belief in an ideology) is one possibility, but the definition also includes a couple of other components. First, support of a political party is a common and acceptable use of the term. Second, there is often the negative implication of “blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”. Although Pandagon argues that partisanship is not “a good or bad thing on balance”, I’m not aware of any pundits who identify themselves as partisan — Paul Krugman has explicitly denied it. Mr. Krugman’s own use of the word “partisan” or “partisanship” in columns this year has uniformly used the negative connotation: “raw partisanship”, “partisan Republicans”, “partisan Democrat”, “blatant partisanship”, “partisan hack”, etc.

Lying in Ponds plainly focuses on this common definition of partisanship — unreasoning allegiance to a political party. The point is to try to quantify the difference between an independent pundit who has the “fervor of belief in one’s held values” and one who seems instead to be mindlessly devoted to a political party.

A month ago I noted that Paul Krugman had written only one lonely column with no partisan references, a decrease from eight last year and over fifty in the year 2000. One of his columns last week, “Twilight Zone Economics“, was his second non-political column out of 57 this year. I thought that his Tuesday column this week, “The Road to Ruin” — about the power failure and deregulation — might be another, but the political hammer came down at the end.

Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity criticizes Molly Ivins and others, saying that they “have resorted to rhetorical extremes and factual deception to attack conservatives and the Bush administration.” Mr. Nyhan says that Ms. Ivins “invoked the specter of fascism with no serious justification in an August 7 column”. He concludes with:

Those who profess concern for the state of American democracy or honesty in democratic debate - as Ivins, Jackson and Dean all do - should do their part to improve the discourse by refraining from rhetorical excesses and falsehoods.

Spinsanity has criticized Molly Ivins a few times over the past couple of years, but she has not yet been honored with her own section on their topics page.