Lying in Ponds

Jon Friedman writes about Frank Rich in an article in today’s MarketWatch (link via Romenesko):

I recently told a right-wing pal who works on Wall Street that I intended to write about New York Times columnist Frank Rich. For a second, I worried that the alarmed man might try to jump through the phone to get my attention.

“OH GOD!” his tortured response began. “Please! Not HIM! He is the smarmiest, most vicious columnist. He’ll cheap-shot anyone! He is the worst of the left.”

It’s no surprise that Rich evokes such fury from supporters of President Bush. With his eloquent, impassioned criticisms of the administration, Rich has emerged as the most effective critic of Bush in the American media. Rich thrives by presenting a confluence of ideas.

Meanwhile, his fans swear by him. When I told another friend, who works for a national magazine and twice voted against Dubya, that I had interviewed Rich, she gushed: “I LOVE HIM!”

Clearly, Rich, 56, accomplishes a columnist’s primary mission: he inspires passionate feelings of loyalty and loathing from readers. As I noted here a year ago about Rich’s fellow Times columnist Maureen Dowd, another prominent Bush critic (”You either love or hate Maureen Dowd” - Sept. 17, 2004), it all depends on what side of the political aisle you occupy.

Mr. Friedman quotes the columnist on his own political views: “Rich stresses that he is anything but an apologist for the lefties and all of their causes. ‘I trend liberal but I had no use for John Kerry,’ he told me.” Since Mr. Rich was not on the Op-Ed page last year, I didn’t evaluate his columns, so I don’t know what his Kerry index would have been.

I haven’t said anything lately about the partisanship rankings because of all the time dealing with TimesSelect and error/correction issues. Basically, Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins have continued to crank out partisan rants with the usual robotic consistency. Mark Steyn, despite zero positive Democratic references since July, slipped slightly in the rankings with a little bit of substantive criticism of Republicans. The person who has assumed Ann Coulter’s identity slips as well after a fourth crossover column this year, one with a remarkable 40 negative Republican references.

Yesterday’s Public Editor column took the Times to task for failing to correct the obvious, silly Alessandra Stanley/Geraldo Rivera error. But Byron Calame also put in print what he had earlier discussed on his web journal:

Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida.

The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors. This is no time to let those standards slip - even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.

Donald Luskin rightly claimed a victory in the ongoing saga of NYT columnists who are reluctant to follow a simple policy of error correction. Ironically, another example occurred on the same day, as Frank Rich weakly corrected an error in the middle of a column rather than at the end (halfway between a rowback and a real correction):

It won’t for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh’s even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that’s only the beginning: the placement of hacks like “Brownie” and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn’t been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.

I’ll add that to the list as a 2-point error and a 1-point correction. Mr. Rich had another half-hearted correction back in June. I’ve often praised Frank Rich, but his unwillingness to step up to the plate and fully correct his errors is disappointing.

On the other hand, Mr. Rich is one of four of our columnists who made that same error, but he’s the only one to correct it at all. Michelle Malkin and Molly Ivins did the same thing, and Paul Krugman made the error in two separate columns.

Jay Rosen at PressThink does his usual excellent job of analysis, as he considers TimesSelect:

The phrase “exclusive online accesss” advertises two different goods. The first good is the work of the Times columnists themselves. The proposition that some will pay for that is hard to prove until you try, but it’s simple to understand. The second good being advertised is exclusivity. You, the lucky TimesSelect subscriber, have access to these voices. Others do not. The value proposition there is muddled. If we prize up-to-date information about petroleum markets, we might value it more—and pay a premium—if the news is exclusively available to paying customers; but do we value Nicholas D. Kristof’s column more if he’s an “exclusive?”

We don’t. In fact, it’s probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If “everyone” isn’t, less of a must. “Exclusive online access” attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist’s power. In his prime Walter Lippmann was called “the name that opened every door.” Nick Kristof’s brand of human rights journalism, which depends on the mobilization of outrage, is simply less potent if it can’t reach widely around the world, and pass by every door.

Thanks to a generous donation from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous, I subscribed to TimesSelect, and downloaded and evaluated this week’s columns. I’m pleased that Lying in Ponds will be able to maintain a continuous record of NYT columns, and I’ll continue to link to them, even though most readers will not be able to follow the links.

As no one has chosen to contribute toward a TimesSelect subscription, I’ll just carry on without the NYT columnists. Since I do believe in capitalism, I have no problem with the NYT trying to generate revenue from their Op-Ed page; I’ll simply choose not to pay for the premium service.

Jon Fine of Business Week Online questions the strategy on the grounds that “people will shell out for all sorts of media, but print isn’t one of them”. I’m skeptical as well, because it seems likely that the prestigious NYT columnists will lose their place in the national online conversation (e.g. WSJ and Salon). I’d be surprised if the family-owned NYT is really willing to trade influence for profits, once that becomes clear.

UPDATE (10:00 pm): In a comment to this post, Jon Garfunkel has offered to donate $25.

UPDATE (Wed, Sep 21): An anonymous reader has now donated the cost of TimesSelect, thanks! I’ll subscribe and catch up on columns as soon as I can.

As promised, The New York Times has announced its TimesSelect service, which means that I would have to pay $50/year to access their Op-Ed columnists beginning next week. Back in May, the prospect of having to pay to read NYT columns caused me to consider pulling the plug, because I’m opposed in principle and practice, given the extremely low-budget nature of my efforts. At the time, some readers suggested that they might be willing to contribute toward the TimesSelect fee. So if anyone wants to chip in, feel free to hit the PayPal button.

Brendan Nyhan and Matthew Yglesias had an interesting discussion yesterday on Brendan’s blog about the limits of political satire. Here’s Mr. Nyhan:

What Yglesias wrote is not particularly funny, and it uses a jargon tactic I’ve frequently identified in the past. To approach this from another perspective, why is it that statement any more “satire” than what, say, Ann Coulter does when she falsely suggests that liberals want to do various awful things? Isn’t this a distinction without a difference — ie my aggressive jargon is “satire” and hers is vicious and awful? Conservatives certainly find what she does amusing.

And here’s Mr. Yglesias:

There’s a clear difference between a false statement intended to deceive and a false statement intended as satire. Whether or not the satire is successful — i.e., “funny” — isn’t the relevant metric. This from Ms. Coulter, for example, doesn’t seem funny to me, but it’s clearly satire. By contrast, when she wrote “Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy” she was writing falsely in a non-satirical vein.

I think successful satire is difficult, and is often used as a dodge by irresponsible characters such as Ann Coulter and Michael Moore. They can make unsupportable statements to impugn their opponents, and then plead not guilty by reason of satire when challenged. Maybe satire is even more difficult for a serious commentator such as Matthew Yglesias, who I believe was sincerely attempting to commit humor. I’m too clumsy to even attempt satire.

Check out the website Regret The Error; I’ve added it to the “Highly Recommended and Relevant” section of the blogroll. Regret The Error says that it “reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media.”

A reader, Dr. Zev bar-Lev, recently e-mailed some thoughtful criticism of Lying in Ponds:

Interesting site, and I appreciate your attempt to improve your methodology.

But I had immediate doubts, and I don’t see anything to quiet them:  How do you distinguish between ideological predisposition and partisanship?

For example, if a person’s ideology leads him to go right along with a single party for some time (most of a year, or even a few single articles), will that mean that he is partisan?  You may protest that this shows him to be partisan, but I would disagree.

Further and more important:  How do you take account of someone being up-front with his political bent, which as you say would completely wipe out any deception?  Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see any exemption in the methodology behind your list for this difference.  I can’t really pull examples from your list, but I can mention the contrast between radio/TV commentators, such as Michael Medved who is very candidly Republican, as he often mentions, vs. Dan Rather, who overtly denies any partisanship:  I think both would come out partisan on your list, but Medved is totally candid about his partisanhip, ergo not deceptive.

It is on these grounds that I dispute your central claim that partisanship is what hurts democracy — although I agree that covert partisanship can be harmful.  Asking columnists to be objective or fair would be fine IF you had a way of measuring it;  since you do not (as far as I can tell), you are really just blasting away at the whole system, without really offering a real alternative.

It’s sort of like criticizing selfishness, and then not distinguishing selfishness from self-interest, and therefore concluding that “all property is theft”.  But there is a big difference between a billionaire who gives a lot of charity, and one who doesn’t give any.

Am I missing something?

Here was my response:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. The issues you bring up are ones I have tried to deal with from the beginning, because I agree that the difference between ideology and partisanship is crucial. Look at my philosophy page, particularly points 5 through 8:

http://www.lyinginponds.com/philosophy.html

My point has been that a very ideological pundit may have a fairly high partisanship score, but not as high as an extremely partisan one. I’ve always singled out the pundits with the highest scores for criticism, because they have shown over years that their writing clearly goes beyond ideology to true partisanship. An ideologue will sometimes criticize their own party for not being sufficiently pure, caving in to pressure, etc., and that will noticeably lower their score. An extreme partisan almost never does that, creatively finding ways to avoid direct criticism of their own party. For example, Paul Krugman has written over 500 NYT columns without a single one dominated by criticism of his own party or praise of the other. Frank Rich has a somewhat lower score, and he has clearly shown that he is willing to severely criticize his own party (he hasn’t done much of that since his column restarted in April, but I’m sure he’ll get around to it). My conclusion is that Krugman is an extreme partisan, but Rich is merely ideological, nothing wrong with that.

It’s true that an ideologue can write many very partisan columns in a row, but that doesn’t make him a partisan. The point of the rankings is to examine a long enough time period (one year) to see the larger pattern.

I agree with your point about a pundit who is open about their partisan motives. In the case of the 20 print pundits I’m evaluating, as far as I’m aware, all of them purport to be independent commentators. Some have written saying that Ann Coulter or one of the others is explicitly partisan, but I’ve not been able to find any evidence of that. The major papers have policies of editorial independence which seems to apply to their columnists. If one of the pundits were to say that their column was intended to benefit their party, my response would be no longer criticize them on that basis (although their score might be a helpful indication of what acknowledged partisanship looks like!).

I really don’t intend to “blast away at the system”. I’m really asking that the columnists live up to their claims, that they are independent, regardless of where they are on the ideological scale. I think that commentary from sharp and honest liberals and conservatives is very valuable. An independent pundit will not hesitate to criticize their own party when it’s justified, even if they honestly think (on ideological grounds) that it’s justified far less often than criticism of the other party.

Dr. bar-Lev replied with another interesting e-mail; I’ll try to address some of the issues he raised in future posts.

After Paul Krugman’s two corrections last week, the second one was the subject of much confusion and speculation. Tom Maguire seems to have explained things fairly well, and Donald Luskin brings news of a follow-up correction in the strange form of a letter to the editor, and an interesting explanation from Public Editor Byron Calame.

So I’ll give the second (Miami Herald) error two points, but I’ll call it only a 1-point correction. In Mr. Krugman’s favor is the fact that he was relying on an erroneous Miami Herald report, but his correction was slow and grudging, and not posted at the end of a subsequent column as required by NYT policy.

If anyone believes they’ve found a factual error in one of our pundits’ August columns, please describe it in a comment to this post, or send me e-mail. I’ll evaluate any submissions and discuss them in a future post. With the pair of August Paul Krugman corrections on the 2000 Florida issue, I assume that there won’t be anything more significant than that. For Mark Steyn, I’ll look into an earlier suggestion from Tim Lambert on the Johnelle Bryant issue.