Lying in Ponds

There isn’t a link for this yet, but I have a report which is part of a Ph.D. dissertation in economics entitled “Being the New York Times: the Political Behaviour of a Newspaper” by Riccardo Puglisi of the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). Mr. Puglisi has analyzed a dataset of stories in the NYT covering 1946 to 1994, looking to see whether the paper’s relative emphasis on various issues tended to change during presidential campaigns:

My main result is that the New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects, in that during the presidential campaign it gives more emphasis to Democratic topics, but only so when the incumbent president is a Republican. This set of Democratic topics comprises stories about civil rights, health care, labor and emloyment, and social welfare. In fact, controlling for seasonal effects and a deterministic time trend, I find that the New York Times, if the incumbent president is a Republican, increases the frequency of stories about Democratic topics when the presidential campaign kicks in. Such effect is quite sizeable in relative terms: when the incumbent president is a Republican, there are 26 percent more stories about Democratic issues during the three months of the campaign than outside of it. On the contrary, if the incumbent president is a Democrat, the partisan effect and watchdog effect almost cancel each other, so that there is no discernible change in the count of Democratic stories when the presidential campaign kicks in.

Regarding the issue balance of stories out of the presidential campaign, I find that the New York Times devotes more space to Democratic issues, when the incumbent president is a Democrat. It is however unclear whether or not this finding is due to the fact that Democratic presidents dedicate more time and effort to the owned issues, as compared with Republican ones, and the New York Times is simply reflecting this fact through its editorial choices.

I’ll comment on this, probably tomorrow. Thanks to Donald Luskin for sending me a copy of the paper.

I always enjoy watching track events at the Summer Olympics, and this year was no exception. As an alumnus, it was especially fun to see Baylor sophomore Jeremy Wariner follow Baylor grad Michael Johnson in winning the 400 meter gold medal in a scintillating 44.00 seconds, and Baylor junior Darold Williamson join Wariner in winning the 4×400 meter relay.

At my house in Cary, NC, we have about two inches of rain so far from Tropical Storm Gaston.

Friend of Lying in Ponds Andrew Cline of The Rhetorica Network, along with Jay Manifold at A Voyage to Arcturus, announce a new service for journalists:

Recent controversies regarding “legacy media”/”MSM” coverage of the U.S. Presidential campaign, especially the troubling memos regarding the President’s experiences during the Vietnam War, have demonstrated a need for conventional media to draw on the vast, dispersed expertise of the blogosphere.

Can this Schumpeterian gale be harnessed? We believe it can. Amidst the jeering, we have formulated a constructive response — a mechanism whereby a symbiotic relationship between blogging and traditional forms of journalism can be deliberately cultivated.

That mechanism is 411blog.net.

Reporters can use it to quickly authenticate highly technical or specialized story elements with subject-matter experts (SMEs) drawn from the best the blogosphere has to offer, including academics, business people, scientists, and lay experts of all kinds. SMEs on 411blog.net also offer reporters another important advantage: As bloggers in addition to subject experts, they are plugged in to the latest internet conversation regarding their subject areas.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

In this morning’s column, Charles Krauthammer is up to his old tricks, descending the civility scale to question the sanity of his political opponents. Rather than offering substantive criticism of Democratic politicians or policies, he speculates on the motives of those who oppose President Bush, attributing their opposition to a release of suppressed hostility:

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They’ll need therapy.

Spinsanity has documented Mr. Krauthammer’s history of ascribing mental illness to those he disagrees with.

In this morning’s column, Ann Coulter attacks Bill O’Reilly for his treatment of the Swift Vets issue:

There is the Bill O’Reilly method, which is to abandon independent thinking and simply come out in the middle, irrespective of where the two sides are. In response to Newt Gingrich’s remark that the Swift Boat Veterans’ independent ads were “the conservative movement’s answer to Michael Moore,” O’Reilly said, “I don’t want either of them.”

In Nazi Germany, O’Reilly would have condemned both Hitler’s death camps and the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Bill O’Reilly’s world, King Solomon would have actually cut the disputed baby in half.

The O’Reilly method of analysis works well about once a century. The last time was when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

A major goal of Lying in Ponds is to try to draw an important distinction between the perfectly legitimate preference for one party caused by strong ideological belief, and an excessive partisanship arising from “blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”. The rankings here are an attempt to quantify partisanship in order to provide a basis for making this kind of distinction. Both the WSJ Opinion Journal On the Editorial Page feature and the New York Times Lead Editorial have relatively high partisanship scores (currently 40 and 39, respectively), but I would argue that they are not excessively partisan, as are such gorillas of shrillness such as Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman, who have scores twice that high. The OpinionJournal recently published an op-ed entitled “Shame on the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush“, while only yesterday the NYT Lead Editorial strongly praised Republican Senator Pat Roberts. Can anyone imagine Ms. Coulter or Mr. Krugman writing columns like that?

The National Debate’s Robert Cox has called attention to a Maureen Dowd comment on a TV show about “extra-chromosone conservatives”. Mr. Cox also posts a statement from The National Down Syndrome Society condemning Ms. Dowd.

Mr. Cox also dropped in last week on a book release party for the Spinsanity guys. He has pictures. The links don’t seem to be working, so just go to the main page and scroll down.

UPDATE: Robert Cox e-mails with a link to the Spinsanity book party article. He’s just finished switching everything to a Movable Type page.

The New York Observer recently published an article by Gabriel Sherman on CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs and his campaign against outsourcing. The article quotes criticism of Mr. Dobbs by Daniel Henninger:

Mr. Dobbs makes a curious stand-in as a devout middle-class crusader, but in the past year he has woven a new story: that of a Harvard-educated business journalist turned fiery populist who has become a champion of the American worker. And people seem to be buying it: His ratings are up 19 percent in total viewership from last year. Earlier this spring, The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger wrote that Mr. Dobbs was running his show “as if he were doing talk radio at 2 a.m. in Youngstown.” An editorial in The Economist trilled that Mr. Dobbs greeted “every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault.” John Castellani, the president of the Business Roundtable, a C.E.O. lobbying group, dubbed Mr. Dobbs’ anti-outsourcing campaign “a jihad.”

Mr. Dobbs in turn criticizes the WSJ editorial page as ideologues:

As for the claims that he’s just hunting for more viewers with his populist stance, Mr. Dobbs bristles.

“This is madness. This is not intelligence, this is not rational, and this is not American,” he said. “The Wall Street Journal, in my opinion, is a wonderful organization, but on the editorial side they are ideologues, and that adherence to ideology has primacy over openness and dialogue. It’s not unexpected. But it’s a shame that important voices will not be open and analyze the reality.

“Look, I love international trade,” he continued. “I love India so much I’ve taken my family there on vacation. The fact is, does one transfer a job to a foreign country to provide services and products to the home market? The answer is no. This is the first time it’s ever been attempted, and it’s idiotic.

In yesterday’s election, our precinct had only 60 voters out of about 2000 registered voters. Some hours with no voters at all. Ugh. November will be slightly different.

Dean Esmay of Dean’s World offers some constructive criticism of my attempt at a civility scale. He suggests that he would reverse the numerical order of the five categories, so that 1 would be the most civil and 5 would be the least. I like the metaphor of an Ann Coulter column being a Category 5 hurricane of incivility, but then wouldn’t I have to call it an incivility scale? Second, he proposes that there should be both left and right examples of the top and bottom of the scale. I agree with that, except that the examples he mentions are either not columnists (O’Donnell, Moore, Zuniga, Savage) or not on the Lying in Ponds roster (Kondracke, Barone). Of the 33 pundits on the active roster, I don’t believe that any of the Republican pundits are as civil as David Broder, or that any of the Democratic columnists are as uncivil as Ann Coulter. Maybe my selection of pundits could be better. Finally, Mr. Esmay wishes for a very unpleasant fate for those at the bottom of the scale and asks if it is uncivil to say so. Yes, I’m afraid I’d have to assign a score of 1 (or 5!) for that.

Tomorrow I’ll be working all as an election official for a runoff in the Democratic primary for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction. With only one low-visibility race for one party, we’ll have lots of time on our hands. So maybe I can finally finish the most recent volume of the LBJ biography. I’ll have to catch up on the columns on Wednesday.

I’ve always been baffled by the dominance of Maureen Dowd in my site statistics. After the home page, Ms. Dowd’s page is by far the most visited. I really don’t talk about Maureen Dowd that often, except to note that she’s clearly not very partisan. Discussions involving Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman usually dominate my e-mail, but their pages are not nearly as popular. The top five search strings which led visitors to Lying in Ponds this month were “maureen dowd” (420), “ponds” (98), “maureen dowd clinton” (81), “maureen dowd bushworld” (24) and “maureen dowd reagan” (24).