Lying in Ponds

In yesterday’s column, Mark Steyn makes a prediction we’ll add to our list and see how it comes out:

Several analysts are suggesting that the 2006 elections are shaping up like 1994, when Newt’s revolution swept the Democratic old guard from power.

It’s a bit early for my reckless election predictions, but I’d bet on the Republicans holding both the House and Senate.

UPDATE (11/1): I missed the fact that Mr. Steyn made a second prediction in the same column: “In fact, it’s Syria that’s bitterly divided and becoming ungovernable, and Baby Assad’s fall will not be long now.” So that goes on the list too.

UPDATE (12/29/2006): The Democratic Party took control of both the House and Senate in the November elections. And more than a year after his prediction, Bashar al-Assad is still the president of Syria. So both predictions will be designated “Very Wrong (-2)”.

Molly Ivins was one of the columnists who mistakenly said that former FEMA director Michael Brown was Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. Ms. Ivins never responded to a note I sent at the end of September through WorkingForChange, but here’s a reply to a separate note I sent to the editor last week:

Thanks for pointing out this error. WFC doesn’t formally do retractions/corrections, but I’ve removed the “roommate” reference from the piece.

Best,

Nathan Fox
Editor
http://www.workingforchange.com

In the corrected column, it now correctly identifies Michael Brown as “Joe Allbaugh’s friend”. I’ll count that as a 1-point correction to the 2-point error. That leaves Michelle Malkin as our only pundit who has not yet corrected this error.

Reader Andrew Myers asks a good question in comments:

Maybe the difference in partisanship measured by these methods is real? My impression is that the Republican columnists have lowered their scores by criticizing the administration on grounds of either ideology or competence. Shouldn’t that show a real absence of partisanship? Whereas the Democratic columnists still resist the ample opportunities to criticize the performance of the Democrats. I don’t see the evidence that the apparent difference arises from an especially tilted year.

Yes, the Republican-leaning columnists have lowered their scores by criticizing the Bush administration over the Miers nomination and other things, which might be explained by a lack of partisanship relative to their Democratic counterparts. The problem is that we cannot tell how the Democratic pundits would react under the same circumstances. I started Lying in Ponds in 2002, with mostly Republican control of the government. With the addition of the Senate, their control became complete in 2003. We have solid evidence of how these conservative and liberal pundits have responded to that situation, but almost no information on how they would respond to a Democratic government, or even to a more passive, non-controversial Republican administration. If I am persistent or crazy enough to keep doing this until the White House changes parties, then we could begin to see if Paul Krugman would criticize a Democratic administration (we already know he didn’t in 2000), and whether Ann Coulter would take time out to criticize Republicans when they’re the opposition party.

A few months ago I discussed the possibility of splitting the partisanship rankings into separate Democratic and Republican lists:

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.

The separation begins today in the sidebar on the right.

The great Ed Cone has been summarizing each day’s New York Times columns in a feature he calls DarkTimes.

I’m in Boulder, Colorado all this week on business, so I’ll be a little slow evaluating new columns, especially with playoff baseball also demanding my attention. It snowed today in the Denver area, but I haven’t seen a single flake in Boulder itself — very disappointing.

Editor & Publisher notices that Maureen Dowd has not fully participated in TimesSelect (link via Romenesko), and wonders why. Via Mickey Kaus, Joel Achenbach reveals the furtive underground communities springing up around black market copies of columns by MoDo and other forbidden NYT pundits.

With Gail Collins’ column and the first For the Record feature, the Allbaugh/Brown roommate errors by Paul Krugman (twice), Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich are resolved. They are two-point errors and I think I’m being generous in giving them all 1-point corrections. Ms. Collins also provided the final word on Mr. Krugman’s errors concerning the Miami Herald recount study. Michelle Malkin responded to e-mail by agreeing that the same error should be corrected, but nothing has happened yet. There’s been no response from Molly Ivins on the same error, so of course that’s a 0-point correction.

Matthew Yglesias said an odd thing earlier today on Tapped:

The key skill to master in order to really make it as an A-List Pundit is to maintain a perpetual state of outrage about the situation in America while constantly finding reasons that the two political parties are to blame in precisely equal measure for whatever’s bothering you today.

He was criticizing Sebastian Mallaby of The Washington Post, who is certainly an A-Lister, and we know from last year’s partisanship rankings that Mr. Mallaby’s punditry falls in the finely-balanced Broder-Samuelson zone. But if you look at the top of that same list, or this year’s list, it’s obvious that extreme partisanship is no barrier to making the A-List. A liberal pundit can make it despite writing over 500 columns without a substantive crossover column, and a conservative columnist can make it despite 70:1 negative to positive references to the other party. One mountain, many paths . .

The error-correction follies at the NYT continued this weekend with a column from editorial page editor Gail Collins:

The most important motive for correcting the minor glitches is history. These days, everything we publish is stored not only in the Times archives and commercially available archives, but in the files of an army of search engines. We don’t want a college student of 2050 to come up with the wrong year for James Madison’s death because of our error - particularly not when we have the means to amend the record. The news section of the paper publishes this kind of corrections in a separate For-the-Record listing. That seems like a good idea - particularly because it makes it easier for readers to notice the other kind of corrections, which really make a difference. Those shouldn’t get lost amid the misspelled names and miscalculated dates.

From now on, we’re going to use a similar system. A “For the Record” column of errata will run under the editorials whenever it’s appropriate. The first one appears today. It corrects several misstatements about when Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA director, met his successor, Michael Brown, now legendary as a disaster in his own right. Although there have been multitudinous references throughout the media to the two as former college chums or college roommates, they in fact went to different schools. A spokeswoman for Mr. Allbaugh says that while they have been close pals for a long time, they met after graduation. Obviously, if we’re debating the serious issue of allegations about cronyism at FEMA, a friend is a friend whether the relationship was born off campus or on. That’s what makes this one perfect grist for “For the Record.”

The Brown/Allbaugh correction was then published in the new For the Record section. It’s good that the error was finally corrected, and I have no objection to the concept of dealing with minor errors into a separate location. But I agree with Cori Dauber that this was not a When Did James Madison Die kind of error:

The difference is this: she isn’t editing straight news pieces, she’s editing opinion writers who seek to persuade through the force of their argument and the force of their writing. And in that sense there is a difference, and a big one, between saying that these two men have been friends for many years and saying that they were college roommates: the second has far more rhetorical force. It just sounds, and writes, better, if that’s the argument you want to make.

So simply tossing this off as if it were a misspelled name doesn’t get it. This does function as substantive information because it meets this simple test: does the discovery that it isn’t true appear to weaken the case made by those columnists who used the information? If the answer is even incrementally yes, then it’s way, way more than an incorrect date and needs to be treated as such.

The issue reminds me of the Ken-Lay-stayed-in-the-Lincoln-Bedroom-during-the-Clinton-administration myth, ably debunked by Spinsanity. A piece of incorrect information got out into the news stream and various pundits latched onto it because it supported the case they wanted to make. An error like that should be directly corrected by the columnists.