Pundit Boxscore for Tuesday 15 July 2003

SIX MONTH REVIEW -- MOLLY IVINS: One of the syndicated columnists added to Lying in Ponds this year, Molly Ivins had the fourth-highest partisanship score after six months of columns in 2003. Ms. Ivins' exceptional sense of humor is apparent in her biography:

Molly Ivins is from Houston, has a B.A. from Smith College, a Master's in journalism from Columbia University and studied for a year at the Institute of Political Science in Paris. She began her career in journalism as the Complaint Department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, from whence she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings.

. . .

She speaks both French and Spanish, loves to camp, canoe and run rivers and is a semi-famous storyteller and beer-drinker.

She is author of two best-selling books, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, both collections of essays on politics and journalism. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times and was the winner of the 1992 Headliners Award for best column in Texas.

However, Ivins counts as her two greatest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.

As I said in yesterday's review of Peggy Noonan, one should be very cautious about drawing firm conclusions from only six months of columns. But so far, Ms. Ivins shows all the signs of being a very partisan columnist. Her ratio of 6-1 positive to negative Democratic references and 7-1 negative to positive Republican references are quite one-sided. She criticized Republicans in 45 of her 50 columns -- the one column which received a contrary score had only a single offhand positive reference to Governor Jane Hull of Arizona.

One partisan signature is the inability to resist digs at political opponents even in columns on non-political topics. Perhaps it doesn't rise to the level of the Partisan Non Sequitur Hall of Fame, but Ms. Ivins found a way to take shots at both President Bush and Kenneth Starr in her July 4th column on "the sheer improbable bliss of life in a free country". Another revealing trait is the tendency to rush to criticism of political opponents based on premature or otherwise questionable information. Ms. Ivins nominated Donald Rumsfeld for a "What Were They Thinking?" title over the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. Although the looting story is now believed to have been greatly exaggerated, Ms. Ivins has not yet offered any sort of correction, as far as I know.