Lying in Ponds

I apologize for the slow posting recently. Approaching deadlines on my real job have kept me (happily) occupied almost exclusively with winds in the Altamont Pass for a couple of weeks. I’ll be at a conference next week, so things won’t slow down for at least another week.

Eugene Robinson is no longer on the active roster, but I was interested to see that his column is getting a big response (via Romenesko):

Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s best personnel move was not appointing Gene Robinson managing editor.

Downie’s decision freed Robinson to write an op-ed column, which he started in February. Judging from reaction by readers and newspapers that have snapped up his essays, Robinsons column is a raging success, in the newspaper and on its web site.

Already 25 papers have agreed to syndicate his column, including dailies in San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, and Phoenix.

One by one, editors’ hearts are being taken away, says Alan Shearer, editorial director of Washington Post Writers Group. There’s a lot of support out there.

With Monday’s column on the economy, Paul Krugman now has written seven columns this year with no political references, after writing only one in all of 2004. Maybe it just shows a slight relaxation of partisanship in a post-election year; even Ann Coulter has shown a bit of ambiguity. Mr. Krugman’s overall partisanship score remains very high due to his 80-to-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references, and Ms. Coulter is not far behind.

As another component to the new Lying in Ponds, I plan to monitor and evaluate any predictions made by one of our twenty pundits. Here’s the first one, from Frank Rich:

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.

I’ve added a prediction list to the sidebar on the right side of the page, under the list of recent columns. So if Mr. Rich’s forecast of a Rove resignation is vindicated, we’ll give him credit. If not, we’ll point that out.

UPDATE (7/18/2006): A year later, Mr. Rove has not resigned, and Mr. Rich wrote last month that he was “freshly released from legal jeopardy ($)” without mentioning his previous prediction. Since Mr. Rich’s prediction was so unqualified (”only one certainty ahead”), let’s officially call it “Very Wrong” and assign it a value of -2, as opposed to “Wrong” (-1), “Murky”, “Too Early to Tell”, “Right” (+1), or “Very Right” (+2).

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has long taken an admirably independent stance on the Valerie Plame affair. Whether you agree with his position on that issue or not, I think he really nails the tribal, partisan thought process here (scroll down):

Lucky liberals! All over the web, Grand Inquisitors are telling you tales that keep you excited and energized. Good news! Your tribe has been perfectly right from the start! And the other tribe has been evil and wrong! Your blood has raced — at last you’ve felt justified — as you’ve read these pleasing tales. But uh-oh! These scribes have been playing the time-honored role perfected by pseudo-con hacks of the 90’s. They’re filling your heads full of pleasing tales in which your side is eternally right. Unfortunately, Wilson’s performance has been so bad that, in the matter of Plame and Rove, many of these tales are just wrong. But no matter! You can still believe them if you wish — if you want to be played for a sucker.

Last week I called attention to a weak Molly Ivins correction, but more than half of her column yesterday consisted of a major correction which begins and ends this way:

CROW EATEN HERE: This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.

. . .

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.

Her original error was huge, so she deserves condemnation. Arthur Chrenkoff and Michelle Malkin noted the error at the time.

But at least Ms. Ivin’s correction is correspondingly forceful and comprehensive. She clearly labels the correction; she explains completely how the error occurred; she doesn’t attempt to transfer the blame to anyone else; she doesn’t use a disreputable “rowback”; she doesn’t take the opportunity to snarkily restate her original point. If I had my pundit challenge system in place, I would call this a three-point error and a three-point correction.

Our partisanship rankings have always been a single list combining Democratic and Republican pundits, and I’ve gone to some lengths to try to account for the unbalanced political landscape. But this year’s rankings suggest that it’s an impossible task — there’s almost a total stratification, with Democratic pundits having higher partisanship scores. That could mean that our ten Democrats are just more partisan, but I don’t think the data supports that.

Controversial, activist Republicans control both elective branches of government and I think we’re just seeing an extreme difference in the available targets for criticism. Most columnists spend far more of their time criticizing the other party than defending their own. Democratic pundits in 2005 work in a target-rich environment: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, DeLay. Last year there was John Kerry and John Edwards, but how many high-profile Democrats can provide enough material for the steady screed-stream necessary to top the rankings? How many columns could one write about Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton in a non-election year while they’re out of power?

When Republican pundits have a shortage of juicy Democratic targets, they tend to write a scattering of cultural columns and find a few occasions to substantively criticize other Republicans. For instance, Charles Krauthammer’s score is half what it was during his anti-Kerry 2004; this year he’s written some serious Republican criticism along with several non-political columns on the Middle East and one on baseball.

I’ve resisted it in the past, but maybe I should print separate partisanship lists for Democratic and Republican pundits to make it clear that our methods cannot fully account for the political environment, at least in a year as tilted as 2005.

Beginning this month, I will try to take note of any time one of our 20 pundits makes a correction, so here’s the first one. Molly Ivins inflated Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s importance in a column last month:

The amusing case of the congressman whose house was bought by the founder of a defense firm for $700,000 more than it was worth is being exceptionally well-reported by the congressman’s hometown paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune. You will not be amazed to learn the congressman in question (Randy Cunningham) oversees the committee that grants contracts to that very defense firm.

Ms. Ivins issued a correction yesterday, now calling him “obscure”:

True, Duke Cunningham is merely an obscure Republican from San Diego (Crow Eaten Here: In a recent column, I said Cunningham was in charge of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, whereas actually he is only a member thereof… apologies. He is also on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.) On the other hand, the whole tale is so… so prototypical, so archetypal, so (even though I keep promising not to use the word) paradigmatic.

Now that we’ve thinned the roster, I plan to spend the rest of the year developing a system to evaluate the accuracy and fairness of pundits in addition to the ongoing partisanship work. A couple of weeks ago I suggested a basic approach. Because I’m afflicted with the scientist’s tendency to try to quantify everything, I’ve naturally been working on a way to convert these pundit challenges into some kind of point system.

Each month I would accept suggested challenges to the accuracy and fairness of each pundit’s columns and choose no more than one per pundit at the end of the month. Since the issues would likely range from minor factual mistakes to major offenses, we should try to distinguish between them. My idea is to assign 1 to 3 points for each challenge. A 1-point challenge would be a relatively minor problem such as the William Safire example I used in the previous post. A 3-point challenge would be a major problem, such as the trope-creation of Robert Scheer or the quote-doctoring of Charles Krauthammer. A 2-point challenge would be something in-between.

Of course the pundit challenge could be proven wrong after investigation, so the pundit wouldn’t lose any points, and maybe they should be awarded a point for being vindicated. Everyone makes mistakes, so pundits should be able to recover some or all of the error points from a challenge by promptly issuing a full and sincere correction, something many columnists seem to find very difficult to do. The point of all of this would be to try to discern substantive differences in the accuracy and fairness of the various pundits, their responsiveness to legitimate criticism, and their willingness to correct errors.

With yesterday’s Victor Davis Hanson column, all four new columnists have made an appearance. This will be our first look at Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg and Mr. Hanson, but I evaluated Bob Herbert in 2002. Back then, Mr. Herbert wrote some very partisan columns, but he mixed in enough local or cultural columns without political references to bring his partisanship score down to the middle of the pack.

Instead of posting a boxscore each day with new columns, I’ve added a list of recent columns in the sidebar to the right. Click on a name to go to the original column. Click on the “Latest Columns” header to see the same list of columns in the boxscore format, showing the evaluation of each column for partisanship.

Boxscore

Boxscore

Today begins the new twenty-pundit regime, and it brings the first Jonah Goldberg column. Bob Herbert, Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson will appear with their next columns. Mr. Goldberg tops the partisanship rankings because of a single negative reference to “the late communist stooge Henry Wallace”. The numbers for the new pundits will fluctuate a lot over the next few weeks.

Boxscore