Lying in Ponds

In past years I’ve posted a partisan punditry review on New Year’s Day, but I’ll be a little late this time. We’ll be loading up the minivan in the morning and driving to Alexandria, VA to visit my nephew and his wife for the weekend. So I’ll close out the 2004 numbers and summarize the results by Monday or Tuesday.

Harry Jaffe, writing for the Washington Buzz column at Washingtonian Magazine, picks favorite and least favorite Washington Post columnists (link via Romenesko). Mr. Jaffe says that Sebastian Mallaby is the “Sharpest Eye Abroad”, but he rips Richard Cohen as the “Most Trapped in his Head”.

So after an entire year of evaluating The New York Times Lead Editorial, The Washington Post Lead Editorial and the WSJ OpinionJournal On the Editorial Page feature (over 1000 total columns), what have we learned? In the partisanship rankings, the NYT’s Democratic score and the WSJ OJ’s Republican score were almost exactly equal, while the WP leaned only slightly Democratic, resulting in a partisanship score way down the list in David Broder territory. Both the NYT and WSJ OJ fit the profile of columnists like Cal Thomas or E.J. Dionne, who are sharply ideological but not excessively partisan, willing to write crossover columns with some frequency. The NYT sometimes writes editorials like this morning’s, praising Republicans on immigration reform, while the WSJ was willing to turn over their editorial space to a sharp critic of the Swift Boat Veterans in the heat of a presidential campaign.

Does the similarity of the NYT and WSJ OJ scores contradict Michael Tomasky’s finding that The Wall Street Journal’s editorials were more partisan than those written by The New York Times? No, for two important reasons. First, Mr. Tomasky was careful to compare editorials written during both Democratic and Republican presidencies, but the 2004 editorials I’ve evaluated tell only part of the story. Second, the WSJ OpinionJournal is not the same as the WSJ — I really don’t know whether the editorials selected each day by the WSJ OJ for their On the Editorial Page feature are representative, or more partisan or less partisan than the average WSJ editorial.

Since I spend most of the time here criticizing the usual suspects for excessive partisanship, it’s useful to take a break once in a while and offer praise for columnists whom I admire for their independence. In a recent e-mail, Peggy Kaplan, who writes the blog what if?, had this to say:

I’ve found few issues of significance in my lifetime that didn’t have shades of gray and aspects that raised difficult questions. The fair and balanced columnists do write about these shades … and, in my opinion, it ultimately serves to bolster their opinions, because the reader has the feeling that they are fair and they do question everything.

I think that columnists such as David Broder and Robert Samuelson hold mostly centrist views, so they naturally end up with very low partisanship scores. I admire a columnist like Richard Cohen, who can be a strident liberal critic of Republicans, yet still have the independence to hammer Michael Moore and graciously praise Ronald Reagan. Also on the left, both Clarence Page and William Raspberry are willing to grapple with difficult issues, taking seriously all sides of an argument.

On the right, Jeff Jacoby is a principled conservative, who doesn’t hesitate to criticize “the most bloated budget ever“, or to single out Russell Feingold for praise. In his first full year at The New York Times, David Brooks has been independent and consistently thought-provoking.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m planning to drop Bill O’Reilly and the three newspapers’ lead editorials for 2005. Thank you to several readers who have suggested new columnists. I’ve tried to limit the roster to regular, accessible columnists who write mainly about domestic political issues rather than local, international or cultural issues.

My tentative plan is to add Robert Novak, even though I worry that he’s the kind of columnist who writes mostly about “horse race politics” — John Fund nearly drove me crazy when he was on the active roster in 2002. Nicholas Kristof seems to be writing on domestic issues more frequently these days, so I’ll activate him. Then I’d like to add a couple of columnists who are immensely popular in syndication: Ellen Goodman and Kathleen Parker. One final addition will be Michelle Malkin, whose profile seems to have risen in the past year. Mark Steyn is a common suggestion; I’m still considering him. Leonard Pitts Jr. and Froma Harrop are very popular, but they seem to write more about cultural than political topics.

On Monday, reader Barry McPhail disagreed with my equation of partisan spinning and lying, in which I specifically cited both Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman.

First, he argued that “Paul Krugman’s facts are usually independently verifiable whereas Ann Coulter doesn’t even try to determine or even much care if the things she says are true in an objective sense”. I agree to a point — Ms. Coulter’s distortions far exceed those of Paul Krugman, and they have been well-documented at Spinsanity. But as Mr. Krugman’s partisanship has deepened in recent years, he has become increasingly careless with facts and insinuations. Applying the same Spinsanity standard, he has also fallen short on more than one occasion, and he has been building an impressive record of poor predictions.

Second, Mr. McPhail generously offers Mr. Krugman a partisanship exemption by saying that “a columnist with a high regard for truth in public discourse might find it more important to focus on the deceptions of the frequently-lying side.” Certainly one party may be more wrong or dishonest than the other, and a pundit with or without a high regard for the truth may decide to make it their special mission to criticize the bad party. This year, Mr. Krugman’s ratio of Republican to Democratic criticism stands at a staggering 45 to 1 (809 to 18). But the act of choosing to emphasize the sins of the other side and ignoring those of one’s own side is clearly a partisan act — a judgment that it’s more important to defeat the bad guys than to offer independent analysis and let the chips fall where they may. That wouldn’t be spinning or lying if the intent were fully disclosed, just as advertising copy is not expected to be balanced. But Paul Krugman has explicitly denied partisan intent, and I’m not aware that Ann Coulter or any other Lying in Ponds pundit has ever admitted being anything other than a proudly independent voice. So until Mr. Krugman and Ms. Coulter acknowledge the partisan selectivity that Mr. McPhail grants as an acceptable justification for one-sided punditry, they are spinning; they are lying, and it’s wrong.

Nebraska’s armadillos.

David Broder, a Cubs fan (cough, cough) like his colleague George Will, hopes that the apparent arrival of the Washington Nationals in the District will lead to an era of good feelings:

Many theories have been offered about the causes of the increasingly bitter partisanship that has infected Washington. Things have reached such a sorry state that Bob Novak, the most garrulous of TV quarrelers, has advocated simply muzzling Senate Democrats by stripping them of the right to filibuster judicial nominees.

When a born contrarian such as Novak says the dissonance in the Capitol building has become so screechy that even he can’t stand it, you know things have hit bottom.

What has been missed by most of the historians and political scientists is the fact that political conditions in Washington began to decline in 1971, the year the baseball Senators decamped for Texas and became the Rangers.

Jay Rosen at PressThink calls attention to a great story, the remarkable blogging developments taking place in Greensboro, NC (an hour west of here), centered around Ed Cone and the News-Record.

Reader Barry McPhail reacts to my post last week which equated partisan spinning to lying:

Nope, sorry. You are falling into a serious logical error.

If you wish to define partisanship as most always taking one side’s perspective, fine. But lying is held to a standard of comparison with objective truth. And we’ve already established in previous correspondence that your partisanship ratings do not look carefully at the factual basis or lack thereof of the positions taken…merely that those you classify as partisan consistently take one side over the other.

For example, I’d say that Paul Krugman’s facts are usually independently verifiable whereas Ann Coulter doesn’t even try to determine or even much care if the things she says are true in an objective sense. I am partial to the Democratic point of view but I think that this is a fair summary of the situation for those two particular columnists.

It could be argued (and I think that you do, at least implicitly) that in the normal course of events a “nonpartisan” commentator would naturally take positions on either side of various questions. This is only a reasonable assumption if the frequency of lying is approximately equal on both sides. If at a particular time in history one side is characterized by persistent disregard for the truth then a columnist with a high regard for truth in public discourse might find it more important to focus on the deceptions of the frequently-lying side.

In any case, you cannot make the assumption that high partisanship and lying are one and the same. Your grounds will not support that conclusion.

I’m off this morning for a quick business trip to Albany, NY. I won’t be able to do Friday’s columns until the weekend.

It’s time to make decisions on changes to the Lying in Ponds roster for 2005. My inclination is to:

• Drop Bill O’Reilly on the grounds that he’s not a real columnist — you can’t even access his old columns online unless you pay to become a “Premium Member“. Not a chance.
• Stop evaluating the lead editorials for The New York Times and The Washington Post and the On the Editorial Page feature of the WSJ OpinionJournal. Evaluating those three columns each day adds significantly to my workload, and I’m not sure the results have been interesting enough to be worth the effort.
• Find one or two new columnists to add.

Comments, suggestions? Let me hear from you.

Engelbert Humperdinck

I’m always happy to see C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, appear in a column. One of my favorite columnists, William Raspberry, considers Lewis’ thoughts on marriage in the context of the current debate on same-sex marriage:

C.S. Lewis, the British essayist, author and cleric, died 41 years ago, so he wasn’t writing about same-sex marriage in America. No, his subject in his book “Mere Christianity” was divorce. Still, his observations may shed some light on our “values” controversy today.

C.S. Lewis was an essayist and author, but he was certainly not a cleric. He was a lifelong academic whose Christian writings came from his perspective as a church layman.