Pundit Boxscore for Thursday 17 July 2003

SIX MONTH REVIEW -- ROBERT SCHEER: Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, new to Lying in Ponds this year, has the second-highest partisanship score through the first six months of 2003. From his biography:

Robert Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.
. . .

An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books, including "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power"; "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War" and "America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals."

Over the years, Scheer has been honored for his work, including his coverage of the underprivileged and the welfare system. Recently, he was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego and Yale University.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Robert Scheer has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the few pundits to have a section devoted to them on Spinsanity's handy topics page. Spinsanity has been unsparing in their criticism of Mr. Scheer, as in this 2001 piece by Ben Fritz:

At a time when all too many pundits engage in their share of lies, spin, and jargon, Robert Scheer stands out in a class by himself. In column after column, his favored tactics have been irrational criticism, distortion, and spin. At his worst, Scheer's false tropes spread and become part of the commonly accepted discourse. Since September 11, for instance, as Dan Kennedy noted in the Boston Phoenix , the Taliban aid trope has been repeated in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Denver Post and Salon. For those concerned about the rise of irrational discourse in American politics, Robert Scheer stands out as one of the worst offenders.

Lying in Ponds agrees with Spinsanity that Mr. Scheer has practiced "irrational discourse", but that doesn't necessarily make him guilty of partisanship. Mr. Scheer's high partisanship score results from his unrelenting criticism of the Bush administration this year; his 14-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references includes contemplation of impeachment in five different columns. Despite that, I believe that there are good reasons to reserve judgment about whether Mr. Scheer's one-sided commentary should be considered to be evidence of excessive partisanship:

• As I said in the Peggy Noonan review earlier this week, six months of columns is not a large enough dataset. Like Ms. Noonan, Mr. Scheer's writing this year has been almost entirely concerned with issues surrounding the war in Iraq. As a staunch opponent of the war, Mr. Scheer's high ranking may be misleading, because it doesn't reflect his views on the wider range of subjects which would naturally arise over the period of a year or longer.
• Robert Scheer has been by far the most "asymmetric" pundit in the rankings, a term I've used to mean that he has a large imbalance in references to the two parties. He has hardly mentioned Democrats this year, only about one time for every 20 times he mentions Republicans. I had a dialogue with a reader earlier this year about whether it's appropriate that the methodology allows a pundit to achieve a high partisanship score by criticizing one party without at the same time approving the other. I believe that it is appropriate, but I'm open to being persuaded otherwise. Again, a longer period of record should help clarify Mr. Scheer's treatment of the Democratic party.