Finally, An Authoritative Pundit List!
For years I’ve complained about the difficulty of choosing which subset of pundits to evaluate, because I couldn’t find any solid data on which columnists were the most widely syndicated, widely read, etc. Finally, Media Matters released a report last year that determined the top syndicated political columnists based on a comprehensive survey of American newspapers (”1,377 of the 1,430 English-language daily papers in the United States, or 96 percent”).
Given the strong ideological bias of Media Matters, it’s not surprising that some of their methods and interpretations are a little questionable. For instance, they emphasize that: “The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives”. But the choice of 10 is arbitary — their list shows that the top 5 is evenly split, and there are more progressive than conservative columnists in the top 15 or the top 20.
But I think that the tabulation of the top columnists is extremely valuable, and I will revise the Lying in Ponds roster based on their data. It is very surprising to me that some of our pundits have much less “reach” than I had assumed. Frank Rich finishes far down the list at number 63, and our defending partisanship champions are 95th (Ann Coulter) and 98th (Joe Conason).
My approach then, is to begin with the Media Matters “top 100 columnists based on total reach” (Appendix 1), and make adjustments. I believe that Gail Collins and William Kristol have to be in the top 20 because of their elevation as regular columnists at The New York Times, and I’ll include Peggy Noonan even though Media Matters didn’t consider The Wall Street Journal as a part of their project. These three columnists will replace the lower members of the Media Matters Top Ten lists: Froma Harrop, Michelle Malkin and Robert Novak. So here are the lists of the top 10 Democratic and Republican columnists to be evaluated in 2008:
Top Democratic Pundits:
- Ellen Goodman
- Leonard Pitts Jr.
- Maureen Dowd
- Paul Krugman
- E.J. Dionne Jr.
- Clarence Page
- Eugene Robinson
- Nicholas Kristof
- Bob Herbert
- Gail Collins
Top Republican Pundits:
- George F. Will
- Kathleen Parker
- Cal Thomas
- Charles Krauthammer
- David Brooks
- Reuben Navarrette Jr.
- Thomas Sowell
- Jonah Goldberg
- Peggy Noonan
- William Kristol
It will take me a while to do some programming to retrieve and process columns from some of the new pundits, and I’m way behind already, but I’ll catch up eventually.
