Pundit Boxscore for Monday 17 January 2005

PAULY "ONE-NOTE": Brendan Nyhan takes issue with the "casual disdain" expressed by ABC's The Note toward Paul Krugman, which referred to him as Pauly "One-Note" Krugman:

Krugman is consistently anti-Bush; therefore his writing is dismissed as partisan hackery even when it's not. What's sad about this is the press has a pitiful level of understanding of Social Security, and they could learn something from Krugman, one of the top economists alive (who has written a nice primer on the issue for the online-only Economists' Voice [196K PDF]). Here's a case in point: numerous reporters can't even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts. It's certainly true that Krugman sometimes bangs the drum too hard or fails to find fault with liberals, but there's nothing wrong in principle with being a forceful and consistent advocate for your views.

Of course I'm a huge fan's of Spinsanity's work, and I agree strongly with Mr. Nyhan's larger point that the press should pay more attention to the substance of an issue and less on the politics. But I believe that he falls victim here to a very common misconception of Paul Krugman's work. Because Mr. Krugman is an award-winning economist, had shown some willingness to criticize Democrats in the 1990's, and because he doesn't generate the dripping vitriol of Ann Coulter or the lengthy record of deception of Robert Scheer, his writing is erroneously assumed to be free of "partisan hackery".

The only way to discover that his more recent writing has been precisely anti-Republican rather than anti-Bush, and that he has carefully failed to find fault with all Democrats rather than with liberals, is to carefully analyze the entire record of 450+ New York Times columns, and I'm the only person who's been curious enough, or perhaps weird enough, to do that. As I've described in excruciating detail, each of the alternative theories which have been offered for Mr. Krugman's one-sided punditry fail when tested against the data. He doesn't simply criticize those in power -- he wrote over 100 columns during the Clinton administration with almost no Democratic criticism, omitting any mention of the Marc Rich pardon, for example. He doesn't merely dislike the Bush administration -- his 30-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references this year does not include more gentle treatment of moderates like John McCain (compare Thomas Oliphant or E.J. Dionne). He doesn't simply write about economic issues -- even columns about elections in France have been used to bash Republicans. His columns break down more perfectly along partisan lines than any other Democratic columnist I've examined, including Robert Scheer, Molly Ivins and Joe Conason -- no small feat. Paul Krugman's five years of NYT columns have been exceptionally partisan; it's just not a close call.

Remember when The Blues Brothers asked the bar owner's wife what kind of music they played there? She said "Oh we have both kinds, Country and Western". Perhaps it's unfair to say that Paul Krugman is "one-note", because he actually plays two notes -- he both criticizes Republicans and praises Democrats.