Pundit Boxscore for Friday 18 July 2003

SIX MONTH REVIEW -- ANN COULTER: Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter was a new addition to Lying in Ponds at the beginning of 2003, and through the first six months she is ranked as the most partisan pundit out of the 32 which are currently evaluated, with a score of 84 out of a possible 100 points. From Ms. Coulter's biography:

Ann Coulter is a lawyer and author of the New York Times best seller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. Her most recent book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right , is a number one New York Times Best-Seller.

Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, Hannity and Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, American Morning With Paula Zahn, Crossfire, ABC's "This Week", Good Morning America, the Leeza Show, and has been profiled in TV Guide, National Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and George Magazine. She was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.
. . .
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

Like Robert Scheer, Ann Coulter has been criticized so often by the non-partisan analysts at Spinsanity that she has been given her own section on the Spinsanity topics page. Brendan Nyhan dissected Ms. Coulter's techniques in a 2001 article titled "The Jargon Vanguard". More recently, the publication of her book "Treason" has generated a round of denunciations from across the political spectrum. Lying in Ponds pundits Richard Cohen and Dorothy Rabinowitz have both weighed in, and Mr. Nyhan has summarized Ms. Coulter this way:

With her new book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, syndicated pundit Ann Coulter has driven the national discourse to a new low. No longer content to merely smear liberals and the media with sweeping generalizations and fraudulent evidence, she has now upped the ante, accusing the entire Democratic Party as well as liberals and leftists nationwide of treason, a crime of disloyalty against the United States. But, as in her syndicated columns (many of which are adapted in the book) and her previous book Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right, Coulter's case relies in large part on irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions. Regardless of your opinions about Democrats, liberals or the left, her work should not be taken at face value.

So does Ms. Coulter use "irrational rhetoric" in the service of excessive partisanship, or does her high partisanship score merely reflect a consistent conservative ideology? Despite the general caveat about jumping to conclusions after only six months of columns, I can't see any explanation for Ms. Coulter's one-sided columns other than partisanship. Her leading score is based on a ratio of 14-1 negative to positive Democratic references and a 10-1 ratio of positive to negative Republican references, leaving no doubt about how she feels about both parties. Ms. Coulter continually makes blanket attacks on "Democrats", using the word negatively 53 times in 29 columns. Her score would be even higher if not for the fact that she substitutes the word "liberals" an additional 120 times, far more than any of our other pundits (Mona Charen is second with only 27 "liberals"). Ideologues often criticize their own party for insufficient purity, but Ms. Coulter's negative references to Republicans are mild and rare. Unlike Robert Scheer or Peggy Noonan, Ms. Coulter's columns have covered a range of topics, but nearly every column becomes a partisan screed regardless of the subject matter.

With a controversial Republican administration and Republican control of both houses of Congress, it seems likely that Democratic partisans would be energized by opportunities for criticism, perhaps systematically increasing their partisanship scores. Defying that expectation, Republican pundit Ann Coulter has seized the lead in the 2003 Lying in Ponds partisanship rankings through a series of rants which attempt to convince the reader that the political world is very simple to understand -- all liberals are bad, all Democrats are bad, and all Republicans are good.