Lying in Ponds

Thursday 30 June 2005

Safire on Novak

Ken Waight @ 7:41 am

William Safire resurfaced from retirement yesterday to suggest a Robert Novak column on the Plame-Miller-Cooper case:

Here’s what needs to be done now:

1. The judge should resist the prosecutor’s pressure for coercive, lengthy and possibly dangerous confinement. Judy won’t crack and should not be made to suffer.

2. The prosecutor should submit an information bewailing his witness difficulties in fingering sources in false denial, but showing why no major national-security crime had been committed.

3. Mr. Novak should finally write the column he owes readers and colleagues perhaps explaining how his two sources - who may have truthfully revealed themselves to investigators - managed to get the prosecutor off his back.

4. The Congress should urgently hold hearings on shield bills to conform federal practice to the states’ laws based on Congress’s 1975 directive to the Supreme Court to apply “reason and experience” to extending privilege - which the court did in its 1996 Jaffee decision to psychotherapists.

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Wednesday 29 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 8:18 am

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Tuesday 28 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 7:26 pm

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Monday 27 June 2005

Twenty Pundits

Ken Waight @ 6:55 am

I’ve decided to go ahead and cut the roster from the current 37 active punits to only 20, in order to reduce the partisanship evaluation workload and allow greater attention to accuracy and other issues. Beginning July 1st, our twenty pundits will consist of the top eight liberal pundits on a recent survey, plus David Broder and Richard Cohen:

  1. Paul Krugman
  2. Joe Conason
  3. Molly Ivins
  4. E.J. Dionne Jr.
  5. Frank Rich
  6. Michael Kinsley
  7. Maureen Dowd
  8. Bob Herbert
  9. David Broder
  10. Richard Cohen

My list of ten conservatives again takes the top eight from the survey, plus Peggy Noonan and David Brooks:

  1. Mark Steyn
  2. Jonah Goldberg
  3. Charles Krauthammer
  4. Victor Davis Hanson
  5. Thomas Sowell
  6. George F. Will
  7. Michelle Malkin
  8. Ann Coulter
  9. Peggy Noonan
  10. David Brooks

I’m sticking with newspaper columnists on the apples-to-apples principle, ignoring commentators who are bloggers or write longer magazine columns, etc. Victor Davis Hanson writes for both the National Review Online and Tribune Media Services, but I’ll evaluate only the shorter TMS columns. I haven’t been reading Steyn, Goldberg or Hanson, so I don’t know what to expect from them. I will miss reading some of the pundits, but I’m giving up some quantity in exchange for (hopefully) quality.

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Sunday 26 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 8:02 pm

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Saturday 25 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 11:44 am

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Friday 24 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 11:02 pm

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Thursday 23 June 2005

Nobody Wants to Read Editorials

Ken Waight @ 6:13 am

Tim Noah at Slate makes some good arguments for the elimination of the venerable unsigned newspaper editorial:

Another reason we haven’t yet seen the withering away of the editorial page is that its elimination depends not only on the imagination and guts of editorial page editors to buck respectable opinion but also on the willingness of these editors to eliminate their own jobs. It is a very prestigious thing to be editorial page editor of a major newspaper; within recent memory, two editorial-page editors of the New York Times went on to become executive editor of the entire paper (minus the editorial pages, which are run independent of the news staff). This social reality makes it very difficult for an editorial page editor to kill his editorial page. Conceivably a publisher might do so instead, but he or she would immediately fall prey to the charge that he was doing it to dumb down the newspaper and shore up the bottom line. The real reason to eliminate the editorial page, though, is … editorial. Nobody wants to read editorials. Even sober policy wonks usually avoid them. The compelling format for expressing opinions is the signed column or op-ed. Long may they rule.

Brendan Nyhan concurs:

I have to admit I never, ever read the editorial page for this exact reason. I still think newspaper editorial boards can be a powerful voice on certain issues that are locally relevant or concern the newspaper itself. And in that case, let’s have editorials. Hell, put them on the front page like they used to do back in the old days. But the rest of the time, I’m with Noah — it’s time to abolish a staid format that outlived its usefulness decades ago.

Also see Jeff Jarvis.

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Wednesday 22 June 2005

Challenging the Pundits

Ken Waight @ 6:45 am

If I were to try to evaluate the accuracy of a set of pundits in addition to their partisanship, how would I do it? I evaluate every partisan reference in every column, but obviously I can’t investigate every factual assertion in every column for accuracy. Many bloggers spend hours of their time picking apart the columns of their least-favorite pundit. What if Lying in Ponds could serve as a clearinghouse by keeping a record of substantive challenges to each columnist, along with a defense made in their behalf and the final outcome of the issue?

Perhaps I could find interested bloggers or others to choose the role of either critic or defender of a single pundit. When a critic thinks they’ve found a substantive problem of accuracy or fairness, they could write up a challenge (limited to no more than one per month), which they could post on this website and/or their own. Then the defender would be expected to post a response, and I would forward the issue to the pundit or to their editor if appropriate. Then I would monitor the outcome of each challenge, to document whether the columnist ultimately issues a correction or rowback, offers a defense, or is unresponsive.

To illustrate the concept with a true but non-substantive example, here’s the way a challenge to William Safire back in 2002 might have looked:

Challenge: In his column of 24 January 2002, William Safire referred to “the failure of a dog named Silver Blaze to bark” in a Sherlock Holmes story. As any Holmes fan knows, Silver Blaze was the name of the missing racehorse in the story, not the famous but unnamed dog that didn’t bark.

Defense: If the dog in the story was unnamed, then perhaps its name actually was Silver Blaze, just like the horse! Why couldn’t someone give the same name to a horse and a dog? And who cares anyway?

Result: In a subsequent column entitled “Holmes’s Horse’s Dog” (7 February 2002), Mr. Safire corrected his error, after hearing from “no fewer than 753 irate Holmes fans”.

A portion of a table summarizing these challenges for a single pundit might look something like this:

Column Challenge Defense Result
Pouring Gasoline on the Fire
12 April 2002
The author claims that current gas prices are at a record high, but they were higher in the 1980’s when adjusted for inflation. Agreed. Forwarded to the author and editorial page editor, but no response has been received and no correction issued.
The American Pastime
30 March 2002
The claim was made that Barry Bonds is currently the best player in baseball, when it’s obvious that Albert Pujols is actually the best player. That’s purely a matter of opinion. Not substantive enough to pursue.
That Dog Won’t Bark
24 January 2002
The horse’s name was Silver Blaze, not the dog. The dog was unnamed. Who cares anyway? Correction issued in 7 February 2002 column.

When accumulated over many months or years, tables for each pundit may help highlight substantial differences in accuracy or responsiveness.

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Tuesday 21 June 2005

A Half-Hearted Correction

Ken Waight @ 7:28 am

Everyone makes mistakes, so I’m always happy when a pundit is willing to take responsibility for a simple error and issue a straightforward correction. Tom Maguire pointed out a Frank Rich error — he had claimed that the Pentagon released an embarrassing report “at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend’s little-read papers.”

Give Mr. Rich credit for issuing a correction:

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.”

But it was incomplete, because Mr. Rich wrote as if he simply had the wrong weekend, failing to mention his false claim that the Pentagon had specifically chosen a holiday weekend to minimize scrutiny.

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Monday 20 June 2005

Another Coulter Crossover

Ken Waight @ 7:40 am

Last week’s column criticizing Mel Martinez and other Republicans on Guantanamo was Ann Coulter’s second crossover column of the year. That drops her score by several points, but she continues to lead the partisanship rankings for the third straight year.

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Sunday 19 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 10:47 am

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Saturday 18 June 2005

Ken Waight @ 10:06 am

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Friday 17 June 2005

The Dusty Archives

Ken Waight @ 12:29 am

I have been forgetting to mention that the Lying in Ponds archives are now complete. A few weeks ago I finished loading the old archives into WordPress. So now you can use the search function to find “kudzu-eating goats“, “let starving Africans eat Cal Thomas“, or even “Krugman 500“.

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