Pundit Boxscore for Friday 16 January 2004

PULITZER PARIAH: Jay Rosen, the chair of the journalism department at NYU, wrote a fascinating piece on Paul Krugman on his PressThink weblog a couple of weeks ago, occasioned by Mr. Krugman's New Year's resolutions column. He asserts that Mr. Krugman is not a typical columnist with a background in journalism and an assumption of objectivity, but that he is instead an "outsider", a "pariah", and that "Krugman and the national press live in two different moral universes".

A key figure in national politics since September 11, 2001 is Paul Krugman. The New York Times columnist has been advancing a view of the world in direct opposition to Bush Administration policy and the political aims of the Republican Party. Before a word is written, Krugman is therefore placed in a certain category by journalists who might have read his Dec. 26 column. To them, he is the partisan observer telling an officially nonpartisan press what it should observe. Not a promising rhetorical situation.

Although Mr. Rosen states that Paul Krugman is considered to be partisan by other journalists (a charge which Mr. Krugman has explicitly rejected), he sees value in "the tension between someone like Krugman and others in the press", and in fact argues that his work deserves a Pulitzer Prize:

To me there is no question that for his courage and relentlessness Krugman should be this year's Pulitzer Prize columnist. Who even comes close to his kind of impact? But that award would itself be a political statement about the breakdown of consensus, a development of deep consequence for American journalists, as it is for American citizens.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

CONSISTENT WITH WHAT? At the end of the piece, Mr. Rosen takes notice of Lying in Ponds:

Recently I came across this site about "the absurdity of partisanship." It has a rating system for columnists that is supposed to show how relentlessly partisan they are-- or is it just being consistent? Krugman ranks second on the list, after the notorious Ann Coulter. This attempt to quantify the drift of a writer's opinions is interesting, but I don't see how it counts as "absurd" to be ranked at the top.

My point has always been that opinion columnists play a vital role by offering independent rather than partisan commentary. Each major party spreads over some ideological range, with ongoing intraparty disputes over many high profile issues. Certainly neither party is consistently virtuous. So when the opinions of pundits such as Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman align almost perfectly with those of their own parties over several years of columns on dozens of topics, this amazing consistency cannot be explained on ideological or moral grounds. What's left except for the absurdity of partisanship?