Pundit Boxscore for Tuesday 26 August 2003

RICHARD ERIKSSON: While crediting Richard Eriksson for a good suggestion yesterday, I forgot to provide a link to his website.

SADLY, NO: A weblog called Sadly, no! has offered some thoughtful criticism of Lying in Ponds. Part of the criticism seems to be that the methods used here are not hard enough on Ann Coulter, although oddly there was no mention of the fact that Ms. Coulter currently has the highest partisanship score. Here are a few of the points raised by Sadly, no! and brief responses.

1. Most people (especially those who write opinion pieces -- or have blogs) are going to be (at least) moderate partisans. They'll support a given party, and/or a general set of policy preferences, certain levels and types of government intervention, etc. Expecting them to do anything else seems a bit foolish and pointless.

   I encounter this same question again and again; the answer is in the site summary quoted in Sadly, no!'s post: "Lying in Ponds tries to draw a fundamental distinction between ordinary party preference and excessive partisanship." I also expect pundits to be moderate partisans, but I'm trying to highlight those who go far beyond that.

2. A more useful index would be not a partisan one, but a hack index: to what extent do columnists stretch the truth, make things up or repeat long discredited falsehoods in the elaboration of their arguments?

   Here's what I said a week ago: "Lying in Ponds is focused on the issue of partisanship. My view is that partisanship may lead a columnist to employ 'irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions' (see Spinsanity on Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer), or it may lead a columnist to carefully omit any perspective or inconvenient facts which contradict their own partisan worldview ('accurate', but full of half-truths). I think the former is worse than the latter, but both make rational political decision-making more difficult by contributing another source of distortion rather than illumination to the political debate."

3. The word "liberals" isn't flagged by LIP, but is (routinely) used by Coulter to refer to Democrats, on the assumption that the proportion of people who view liberals as inherently suspicious is much greater than those who think the same of Democrats.

   That's a good point; I've discussed it recently here. The problem was minor until I added Ann Coulter this year; but with her heavy use of "liberals" it's now a bigger problem. So beginning today I will tag the words "liberal" and "conservative" and evaluate each occurrence to see if it is being used a synonym for "Democrat" and "Republican".

4. I really don't understand the criticism of the evaluation of the references to Senators Hutchinson and Kassebaum as negative in this Coulter passage:

   After a lifetime of honorable service to his country, Adm. Kelso was barely permitted to retire with four stars, in a 54-43 Senate vote. A majority of Democrats opposed Kelso, along with all the Republican women in the Senate -- Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Arlen Specter, Bob Packwood and so on.

   Ms. Coulter is strongly supporting Admiral Kelso in the column, thus she is criticizing all four Republicans who voted against him, with an extra dig at Specter and Packwood.

5. Wouldn't that make the sentence "When Al Gore lost the election to George Bush in 2000" a double partisan reference? (Democrat/Negative, Republican/Positive.) If so -- what is the meaning of such an exercise? When even the most neutral statements of facts are viewed through the prism of partisanship it indicates not an excessive partisanship, but an excessive willingness to characterize all debate (and hence discredit) as being excessively partisan.

   I think this goes to the heart of Sadly, no!'s misunderstanding of the approach. Yes, "Al Gore" would be evaluated as a negative Democratic reference and "George Bush" would be evaluated as a positive Republican reference. But no, that doesn't mean that the statement is being characterized as excessively partisan. The partisanship scores presented on Lying in Ponds depend on hundreds of references over dozens of columns. A partisan Republican columnist could easily write columns filled with negative statements about the Clinton administration, leaving out any counterbalancing positive information or perspective. Even if they were careful to be entirely factual with their one-sided presentation, wouldn't that be evidence of partisanship?

Individual references, or even single paragraphs or columns may be quite misleading, but my premise is that when large sets of columns over many months or years are evaluated this way, excessive partisanship becomes apparent. My favorite analogy is the batting average in baseball. A player might get three hits in a game, but all of them "cheap" (infield hit, bloop single, a hit that should have been scored an error). In that case, the batting average for that one game would be very misleading, but over a sufficient number of at-bats it should be meaningful because the cheap hits and line-drive outs tend to cancel each other out, leaving a reasonable measure of hitting performance. In the same way, Ann Coulter will write some columns where she criticizes Republicans here and there, and others where she may state something mildly positive about Democrats. I've already marveled at the difficulty of quantifying Ms. Coulter's off-the-charts negativity, but over 34 columns so far this year, her partisanship is unmistakable, clearly indicated by her number one ranking in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.