Lying in Ponds

I’m sorry to read that Henry Hanks has decided to end his Croooow Blog. Best of luck to him . .

Two of our new columnists for this year are far down the partisanship rankings, both with partisanship indices in the teens. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times mixes a few moderately Democratic-leaning columns with non-political columns, such as his series on Cambodian brothels. Most of syndicated pundit Robert Novak’s columns are Republican-leaning, but his partisanship score is kept down by his many “inside-baseball” political columns, which have lots of neutral references to wrangling politicians.

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Well it serves me right for attempting a little subtle humor; I should probably leave that for the experts. I breezily noted this morning that the 2005 rankings showed Michelle Malkin as the least partisan pundit, but then explained why eight columns didn’t mean much, etc. So now Dave Friedman writes that Ms. Malkin has cited my post as if I believed she really was the least partisan columnist in America. But I now don’t see that post on Ms. Malkin’s site. Did she take it down, I don’t understand.

Let me make this clear — Michelle Malkin’s eight columns so far this year have not been very partisan, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t a partisan columnist. I wouldn’t try to draw any conclusions without at least several months of material. Lying in Ponds crowned Ann Coulter the most partisan columnist in America in both 2003 and 2004 based on at least 50 columns each year. I have asserted that Paul Krugman is an extremely partisan columnist because he has written over 400 NYT columns without once writing one which substantively crossed party lines. Ms. Malkin may or not join them at the top of the partisanship rankings; let’s be a little patient and find out. I’m very sorry if my flippant post misled anyone to think that I was claiming a lack of partisanship based on a handful of columns.

UPDATE (2/26/2005): Dave Friedman has followed up with another post.

Happy third blogiversary to the restless and always-interesting Bama-blogger Susanna Cornett (link via Dean Esmay)! Our middle son was born when we lived in Huntsville, and we would have been very happy staying there, despite one memorable and deadly afternoon.

According to our 2005 rankings, Michelle Malkin is the least partisan columnist in America. Well, not so fast. Eight columns is of course not enough material to mean much. One of her columns was evaluated with a Democratic score of 100, because she approvingly cited Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd for their accounts of the Eason Jordan incident. I haven’t been reading Ms. Malkin’s columns before this year, so I don’t know if that’s a real anomaly or not.

I’m guessing that Michelle Malkin may end up in the middle of the rankings, because she may be like Thomas Sowell — when he writes about politics he’s very partisan, but he mixes in completely non-political columns about economics or culture, lowering his partisanship score significantly. So far she’s written a couple of columns like that, about topics like Snoop Dogg and “cutting”.

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A couple of weeks ago at the Triangle Bloggers Conference, I was impressed by something Cori Dauber said. I think it was in the context of a discussion of whether bloggers should allow comments on their weblogs — Ms. Dauber said that she had learned a lot when she asked her readers to tell her about their interest in the site.

I’d like to try that. We get about 500-600 visitors a day here, if I can believe the statistics produced by the hosting company, but I hear from very few of you. So if you are a regular visitor to Lying in Ponds, please consider taking a couple of minutes to tell me why you visit, what you like and don’t like, etc. I’m interested in whether people find the daily boxscores helpful, or if they are more interested in the partisanship rankings or the commentary. If I get some interesting feedback, I’ll summarize it sometime next week.

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Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who was the 8th most partisan columnist and had only three crossover columns last year, has written two in a row this year. Last week he wrote a column very critical of Los Angeles mayor Jim Hahn, and today he takes aim at his own party for losing the support of the working class.

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One of my favorite readers, Barry McPhail, and I have been carrying on a discussion since I claimed that spinning=lying back in December. Earlier this month, Mr. McPhail argued that “it is clear that for your partisanship score to be an equally accurate measurement of both partisanship and lying, it would be necessary to discover the truth or falsity of each and every assertion and weight the score accordingly, or set up a separate scoring system for truthfulness.”

He’s right, because I’ve always said that Lying in Ponds is trying to measure only partisanship, not lying. It’s true that a pundit could simultaneously be very non-partisan and very dishonest. My point has always been that those at the very top of the rankings are extremely partisan, regardless of any other positive or negative traits. When I said that spinning=lying, I didn’t mean that extremely partisan columnists must be lying about policy issues. I meant that pundits are lying when they claim to be independent voices but actually criticize the other party 70 times more often than they praise it, or criticize one party 45 times more often than the other.

I have no problem believing that one party may be somewhat more truthful than the other on policy issues, but most columnists also spend a significant part of their time writing about the human foibles of politicians. I think it should be obvious that both parties consist of ordinary humans just teeming with foibles. So those who believe that Ann Coulter or Paul Krugman are telling it like it is must believe that their own party is amazingly fortunate to be almost completely free of dishonesty, hubris, greed, etc.

To repeat, the partisanship rankings here do not in any way attempt to measure the extent to which a pundit is more honest or correct on the issues. Other groups, such as Spinsanity and FactCheck.org have tried to serve the public in that way, and I fully support their efforts.
Extremely partisan columnists who write for the “best” party may be mostly correct on the issues, but if they claim the role of an independent analyst while refusing to write about their own party’s flaws or the other party’s strengths, they’re simply lying. I don’t believe that an intellectually honest pundit could actually believe that their party is 45 or 70 times more correct on the issues, or 45 or 70 times more morally pure than the other party. If they did believe that, then for the good of the nation, they should drop the pretense of independence and become an open and forceful advocate for their party.

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Robert Cox of The National Debate blogged like crazy this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He’s posted lots of photos, including some from an appearance by Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge.

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After a few misadventures, Lying in Ponds is now a WordPress weblog. There are quite a few things which need to be done, especially in filling out the blogroll. It’s just my luck that WordPress released a major upgrade on the very same day.

Remember not to get worked up about the new 2005 partisanship rankings yet. Based on only a few columns, some pundits have scores much lower or higher than they will develop over time.

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