Lying in Ponds

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.