Lying in Ponds

In Molly Ivin’s December 28 column, she seemed to urge removal of the president and to predict dire consequences if it does not occur:

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we’re up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Am I misinterpreting her words? She did say “when we lose the republic”, not “if we lose the republic”.

Then in her December 29 column, Ms. Ivins issued a correction to a previous column:

Apology: I bit on a bad story in my Dec. 20 column. The tale of the UMass-Dartmouth student who was visited by the feds for checking out Mao’s “Little Red Book” has turned out to be a hoax. So sorry.

The error was characteristic of Molly Ivins: she too quickly and gullibly grasps at any information damaging to her enemies. The correction was minimal but prompt. I’ll call it a 2-point error and a 2-point correction.

William Raspberry was on the Lying in Ponds roster from the beginning until the change in July, and the award-winning columnist has always been one of my favorites. Mr. Raspberry had already announced that he was ending his column at the end of this year, and in today’s column, he talks about his future plans:

I’ve taken it as my next-step project to help restore the faith that education can work wonders and to help another generation of young people learn to ask: What’s next?

But within my personal limitations. The problem may be nationwide, but I’ve chosen to start in my home town of Okolona, Miss. I’ve mentioned the project — Baby Steps — before. It is my attempt to renew faith in the magic of education and to spark a faith in the efficacy of community. I believe that pulling a community together around the future of its children can do wonders to transform both.

Frank Rich’s Sunday column looks at the movie “Brokeback Mountain”, and Mr. Rich predicts that it will be a hit in the heartland:

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I’ll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - “Can ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Move the Heartland?” - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on “Saturday Night Live” to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called “gay cowboy picture” than for “King Kong.”

I’ve added that to the prediction list in the sidebar to the right. It may be difficult to determine how much of a hit the movie needs to be to vindicate Mr. Rich’s prediction, but maybe it will be decisive one way or the other.

UPDATE (12/30/2006): The results of this prediction turned out to be mixed.

Bryan Curtis of Slate writes a profile of Frank Rich which is not very complimentary:

As someone who shares Rich’s politics and appreciates his bruising style, I find his column to be a strangely unsatisfying experience. For sure, there’s a small thrill in watching Rich turn the decaffeinated Times op-ed page into an outlet for liberal id. But it’s possible to cheer on Rich’s crusades and feel that his column leaves you short. Rarely does he offer much more than illuminating rage. It’s the kind of closed-minded liberalism that, at its heart, is the antithesis of liberalism.
. . .
One of Rich’s colleagues offered me a theory about his place in the Times universe. The writer said that whatever grief the Times catches for being too liberal is counterbalanced by the grief its New York-based correspondents get for not being liberal enough. New Yorkers assume most Timesmen share their lefty political inclinations but are too constrained by balance and integrity to smear it all over the news pages. Therefore, it is the opinion pages—Rich and Krugman’s columns in particular—where they turn for reaffirmation. It’s a kind of airtight ideological bunker that, under slightly different circumstances, would make for a great Frank Rich column.

Although Mr. Rich’s partisanship score is very high this year (based on columns since April), he has a history of some substantive criticism of Democrats. There hasn’t been much this year, but Mr. Curtis quotes Mr. Rich as saying “I think the Democrats are pathetic”.

A couple of different people have pointed me to a new book by Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment : How Good is It? How Can We Know?. A nice discussion of the book by Louis Menand can be found in The New Yorker:

Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.

As a meteorologist (and very undistinguished weather forecaster), a lot of what Mr. Tetlock says is food for thought in my own field.

UPDATE (12/15): NPR’s On The Media has the transcript of a nice interview with Mr. Tetlock. And they mention the weather!

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, I think on balance, it would be a good idea to give some serious thought to systematically monitoring political punditry. I think we monitor professionals in many other spheres of life. I think we monitor weather forecasters, we increasingly monitor stock market analysts, we sometimes monitor doctors. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that when people offer opinions on extremely consequential issues, like whether or not to go to war or whether or not to have welfare reform, or tax policy, trade policy, it’s not unreasonable to ask what are their predictive track records in the past as a guide for how much credibility to attach to what they’re saying in the present.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: It does seem a little more important than whether or not to take an umbrella.

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, that’s important too. [LAUGHTER]

A while back, Brendan Nyhan noticed that I was working to document pundit predictions and pointed me to James Fallows’ book Breaking the News. Here’s the relevant passage:

Weeks before an important Senate confirmation vote, months before a congressional election, years before the presidential primaries begin, the most influential figures in journalism spend their time predicting what is going to happen. When the results come in, attention shifts almost immediately to what it all means for the next tests of political strength. The process is like the acceleration of TV advertisement, in which Christmas shopping ads appear just after Halloween. The big difference between political handicappers and those who set the point spread in sports is that in politics there is no payoff day. For pundits there is no financial or professional penalty for being consistently wrong. There can be rewards for being spectacularly right.
. . .

“These campaign-coverage jobs are the sexiest jobs in journalism,” says a newsmagazine reporter who has covered presidential campaigns. “They pay better. You get more space. The culture rewards you. And they are by far the easiest stories to write. They are the easiest because you cannot get it wrong! It’s all just contending theories about who has a better take on what is up and down, and when it’s over no one goes back to check.”

Bookies would be envious.

Well, now Lying in Ponds will be going back to check. Since July, I’ve been trying to document any predictions made by our twenty pundits. There are six so far, shown in the sidebar to the right. So far, none of the predictions can be shown to be true or false, but “payoff day” will come sooner or later. Long time readers may remember when Thomas Oliphant made an unfortunate prediction which was proven false in less than a day.

Last week I noted that Mark Steyn’s columns had been perfectly negative toward Democrats, in that he had not made a single positive Democratic reference in the several months he’s been on the roster. So naturally his next column contained several positive references to Joe Lieberman and his recent pro-Iraq War column.

For another example of partisan perfection, take a look at Joe Conason’s columns this entire year. He has made only five individual negative Democratic references in his 42 columns, and all of them have been generic: Democrats, Democrats, Democratic President, Democrat, Democratic. In other words, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to criticize a single Democrat by name all year, not even Joe Lieberman.

I don’t really write very often about Joe Conason here — I guess it’s because I can’t think of much to say. Paul Krugman is a substantive (but incredibly partisan) commentator, but Mr. Conason’s writing is Democratic conventional wisdom, utterly predictable and utterly boring.

It seems that I’ve been found by a kindred spirit:

A possible recruit?

I’ve only glanced over his blog, but I suspect this guy could be a potential recruit for the Unparty. What do y’all think?

I mean, aside from the nice allusion in the blog’s name to Michael Palin’s wonderful rant on the proper basis for wielding “supreme executive power (search at the link for ‘ponds’),” this guy’s way of expressing his philosophy is in places eerily similar to my own. I really started when I saw the phrase, “American journalism has been damaged by worshiping at the altar of objectivity.” Yeah, I know he’s paraphrasing someone else, but I’ve been talking about the fact that worship of the “false god Objectivity” is a barrier in the search for journalistic truth for years (oddly, though I’ve said it hundreds of times, I can’t find a single instance where I wrote it; I must be searching wrong). It’s the reason I made the leap from news to editorial — you don’t get to tell the truth in news.

What do I mean by that? Probably not what you think I mean. What I do mean is that news people try to be objective, which means leaving out the subjective (or trying to “balance” it with subjective quotes that pull 180 degree in the other direction). The problem is, a significant portion of truth is subjective, and if you leave it out, the little rump “objective” remnant is a distortion, often bearing little resemblance to the truth.

If you are honest, you will say subjective things. To aspire to absolute objectivity is to lie by omission.

Anyway, I like his distinction between being nonpartisan and being “objective.” Although I’m bothered by the fact that he finds “party preference” acceptable, I suppose he’d be welcome to join us — seeing as how to reject him would be to enforce “fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets,” and we don’t hold with that.

The writer is Brad Warthen, the editorial page editor of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper. Now it’s true that native North Carolinians tend to look askance at South Carolina in general, but my home state is Texas or Illinois or the state of confusion. The Unparty sounds pretty good to me; I’ll be keeping an eye on Mr. Warthen’s blog from now on.