Lying in Ponds

The whole family will pile into the minivan tomorrow morning to drive to a family reunion in Galesburg, Illinois. Then it’s on to visit more family in Arkansas and Texas. My connectivity will be spotty so I’ll probably fall way behind in evaluating columns, deleting spam, etc. Of course my schedule has been difficult this year so falling behind has become common anyway. Have a nice couple of weeks and I should be back on track after about July 4th.

In Joe Conason’s note a few weeks ago, he argues that he is not as partisan as Ann Coulter, mostly by citing past praise of Republicans. One of his examples was a column last month in Salon titled “Don’t punish Hayden for Bush’s sins“. I can’t say anything about that one, because I’ve been evaluating Mr. Conason’s New York Observer columns rather than the web-only Salon columns for the past 2 1/2 years. I’ve followed the same approach with Victor Davis Hanson, evaluating his syndicated Tribune Media Services columns rather than his National Review Online columns.

The other three columns cited by Mr. Conason are in the NYO, so we can easily see if they provide evidence of a lack of partisanship.

(1) The first was his 27 May 2006 column, “Desperate Bush turns to the National Guard“. By looking at the Lying in Ponds page for Joe Conason this year, we can see that it received a score of +57 (57 out of 100 in the Democratic direction). There was one positive Democratic reference (to Ted Kennedy), one positive Republican reference (to John McCain), 11 negative Republican references and some neutral references. The first couple of paragraphs illustrate the tone of the column:

For a brief moment last month, George W. Bush behaved like a responsible leader instead of a partisan demagogue. On the issue of immigration, which provokes so much demagogic and divisive rhetoric on the right, he followed his better instincts by seeking compromise. He took the risk of alienating his own right-wing base and reached out to John McCain and Ted Kennedy by endorsing a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants.

Then he must have looked at the polls showing that the Republican base is deserting him - and panicked.

There are no positive references to the president bcause in each instance where Mr. Conason praises him, he simultaneously criticizes him (e.g. “responsible leader”, “partisan demagogue”). So I evaluated the above reference to “George W. Bush” as neutral. There were a couple of others like that, and there were many more unambiguously negative references (e.g. “Unfortunately, he has waited too long to lead on this issue, and he has proved so incompetent as president that he lacks credibility”).

(2) Mr. Conason’s next example is a 30 March 2005 column, “Schiavo’s advocates contradict themselves“; we can find the scoring on his 2005 page. Mr. Conason cited his praise of Republican judges, and I did score that as a positive Republican reference, but it was again outnumbered by references going the other direction (e.g. “The President and the Congress passed the decision back to the courts so that they could blame the judiciary. “). The overall score of the column was a +73 (Democratic).

(3) Mr. Conason’s final NYO cite is a 6 December 2005 column, “California’s ‘Duke’ heads to the pokey“. A couple of positive Republican references are overwhelmed by the 25 negative references: “Duke, Randy (Duke) Cunningham, Republican Party, Cunningham, Cunningham, Duke, Republican, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Abramoff, Grover Norquist, White House, Karl Rove, Dennis Hastert, Abramoff, Abramoff, Hastert, Abramoff, Republicans, Republicans, Abramoff, Cunningham, Cunningham”. The score for the column was a +68.

To summarize, Mr. Conason certainly praises Republicans occasionally, and each positive reference is duly tagged and used to calculate a partisanship score for each column and a total partisanship score over all columns. But the criticism of Republicans far exceeds the praise (233 negative to 9 positive references this year), so it’s surely not difficult to understand why his partisanship score is quite high. Joe Conason is correct that he praises Republicans far more than Ann Coulter praises Democrats. But it’s also true that Ms. Coulter criticizes Republicans far more than Mr. Conason criticizes Democrats. Last year Ms. Coulter had seven crossover columns, mostly criticizing Supreme Court nominations (”With the Miers nomination, Bush has screwed his base, screwed Republican senators, screwed legal conservatives.”). This year she has three crossovers on immigration (”On the bright side, if President Bush’s amnesty proposal for illegal immigrants ends up hurting Republicans and we lose Congress this November, maybe the Democrats will impeach him and we’ll get Cheney as president.”) Does that prove a lack of partisanship? Of course not — she still has a higher partisanship score than the other nine Republican pundits, mostly due to the intensity of her anti-Democratic rhetoric. Conservative writers seem to be much more willing to criticize the Republican administration in the second term than they were in the first. We’ll see if Republican partisanship scores increase as the mid-term elections approach later this year.

So is it fair to say that Mr. Conason is as partisan than Ann Coulter? I don’t think so, as I’ve explained recently, because the unbalanced political situation makes it impossible to fairly compare Democratic and Republican pundits. But there’s no need to compare him with Ann Coulter — Mr. Conason’s weekly NYO columns have been among the most one-sided when compared with those of the other nine Democratic-leaning pundits evaluated at Lying in Ponds, rivaled only by Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins. Mr. Krugman recently wrote a crossover column criticizing Joe Lieberman, and Ms. Ivins wrote one criticizing Hillary Clinton, but none of Mr. Conason’s 110 columns I’ve evaluated in 2004, 2005 or 2006 have been crossovers. The Krugman and Ivins crossovers highlight a key point — one of the reasons that Mr. Conason’s partisanship scores have been so high is that he criticizes Democrats far less often than his fellow Democratic-leaning columnists. So far this year he’s made 61 positive and 4 negative Democratic references, a ratio of about 15:1. That compares with a 2:1 ratio for Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman, and an 8:1 ratio for Bob Herbert.

Looking more closely at the rare occasions where Joe Conason has criticized Democrats in some way, most of them have been generic references to the party or specific references to Democratic politicians no longer in office. The total list of negative Democratic references this year is “Ann Richards, Clinton, Carter, Democratic president”, and last year’s list is “Democrats(2), Democratic President, Democrat, Democratic, Clinton”. To find a single unambiguously negative reference toward a current Democratic office-holder, I have to go back to an August 2004 column, where he made single critical references to John Kerry and Joe Lieberman in the process of defending Howard Dean. So in the course of approximately 80 NYO columns since then, he has not made a single negative reference to any current Democratic politician, not to Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman or anyone else. Let me be clear — even if I missed a column somehow and Mr. Conason has criticized a couple of current Democrats, it wouldn’t change the point. Mr. Conason’s partisanship score is high because of hundreds of references over more than 100 NYO columns. Some pundits’ scores change significantly from year to year as the political situation changes, but those at the very top of the rankings tend to have nearly identical scores. That occurs because they very consistently choose to focus on scandals in the other party while ignoring scandals in their own, pull their punches when they disagree with those in their own party ideologically, etc.

But there may be more to the story, because a quick check of Mr. Conason’s Salon columns on his website shows that he recently wrote what must be a powerful crossover column, demanding the resignation of Democratic congressman William Jefferson:

When FBI agents reach into a congressman’s home freezer and pull out $90,000 in foil-wrapped bills, it is time for him to resign. When the Justice Department announces that the same congressman is on videotape taking a $100,000 bribe in a Virginia hotel garage, his resignation is overdue.

Perhaps Joe Conason’s Salon columns are systematically more independent than his writing in the NYO? I asked Mr. Conason that question by e-mail, and here was his reply:

I don’t believe that my writing for the Observer is more partisan than my writing for Salon. Most of my citations of Republicans I’ve praised or defended over the years come from the Observer, where I’ve been writing almost twice as long as for Salon. Anyway, the Salon readership is considerably to the left of the Observer readership, as far as I can tell, so there would be no reason to skew the Observer columns leftward.

So where does that leave us? A couple of weeks ago I reiterated the point that Ann Coulter is amazingly uncivil and dishonest, but partisanship is a separate issue:

partisan
a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

Lying in Ponds is an imperfect attempt to quantify the degree to which 20 columnists firmly adhere to one political party, by counting how often they praise and criticize each party over dozens or hundreds of columns, and constructing various partisanship indices as a way of summarizing the results.

The 2 1/2 years of Joe Conason’s NYO commentary is at the very high end of the partisanship scale when compared with the other nine Democratic columnists evaluated here, even taking into account his occasional praise of Republicans. I do not claim that our rankings prove that Mr. Conason is more partisan than Ann Coulter, and I do not believe that he is. Separating the rankings into Democratic and Republican lists last year was an explicit acknowlegement that comparing pundits across party lines is difficult, and perhaps impossible when one party controls Washington as completely as Republicans do today. It is possible that evaluation of his Salon columns will moderate Mr. Conason’s partisanship score, and I plan to do the programming necessary for that when I get a chance.