Transcript
Measuring Pundits’ Partisanship
June 7, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: All right, so we're always getting letters that say "Say! Why don't you guys do a story about weblogs?" All right. Here's a story about a weblog. It's called LyingInPonds.Com. It was developed by a North Carolina research meteorologist to track the partisanship of columnists at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal throughout the year.
,br> The site reads like a sports section. Daily box scores of results from the columns, running stats and rankings on each columnist.
So far this season -- that's since January --Paul Krugman's left leaning columns in the Times give him a commanding partisan lead. Almost double that of his closest competition -- the Post's Michael Kinsley who also skews Democrat, and the Journal's pro-Republican team of Robert Bartley, Peggy Noonan and Collin Levey.
Ken Waight is the brains behind LyingInPonds.Com, and he joins us now. Ken, welcome to On the Media.
KEN WAIGHT: Well, thank you. Glad to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, you figured out some formula for ranking columnists by partisanship. Why?
KEN WAIGHT:Well, I guess my personal feelings don't fit very neatly in either party. When there's elections, I look at who to vote for and try and think about it and read a lot of columnists and so forth, and it's always struck me a lot of times it's very difficult to get at the issues because so many of the people that are involved in the process are very partisan, and they're not really interested in the issues. They're instead using the issues as some sort of hammer to hit the other side with. And so part of my perspective is just I'm interested in what columnists are the ones that I, I really want to pay attention to or maybe which ones can I just skip over because they're predictable and there's no point in reading them.
BOB GARFIELD: So explain to me your methodology.
KEN WAIGHT:I download those columns, and I -- I've written some programs and things that take a list of Democratic names and Republican names, and those are for one the party names themselves and then also the actual names of the politicians -- President Bush, you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, etc, etc. --and then I go through and look at each one of those references and then try and evaluate is this a positive, a negative or a neutral reference. Then I just calculate what I call the partisanship index -- it's just - you subtract the total number of Republican-leaning references and Democratic-leaning references as a fraction of the total number of references which includes the neutral references. And then I multiply by a hundred, so that gives you a number from negative 100 to plus 100 where negative 100 is all Republican and plus 100 is all Democratic.
BOB GARFIELD: Give me some examples. Who rings the bell in partisanship on the Waight scale?
KEN WAIGHT:Paul Krugman of the New York Times is on top of the list by quite a bit, but what I've tried to stress is that 5 months is a pretty good long while but it's not enough to really draw firm conclusions about who's partisan and who's not, and I think a period of a year is kind of a minimum of how long to look at this and try and draw some conclusions from it.
BOB GARFIELD:Isn't bias -- that is to say, a point of view -- more or less fundamental to column writing? Isn't criticizing a columnist for being partisan like criticizing a linebacker for being violent?
KEN WAIGHT: I don't think it is. I'm trying to draw a distinction between a columnist being neutral versus one being independent. Maybe I can give you a little example of the kind of contrast that I'm looking for. I compared Paul Krugman's Enron columns with those by Frank Rich. Both of them attacked Republicans and the Bush administration I think with equal vehemence. There was a big difference, though. Frank Rich noticed that there were Democratic connections to Enron as well. Paul Krugman didn't mention those. So that's kind of what I'm looking for -- that any honest, independent pundit is going to find many times they disagree with their own favored party or that they agree with the other party.
BOB GARFIELD: One last question. Why LyingInPonds.Com?
KEN WAIGHT:This is an obscure reference to a line from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur is talking to a couple of peasants. He's trying to explain to them that he's their king, and they - they're confused by that; they say well how could - how did you become king? We didn't vote for you.
[MONTY PYTHON CLIP PLAYS]
PEASANT: Well how'd you become king then?
KING ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake.
[HEAVENLY CHOIR] Her arm clad in the purest shimmering [say mite] held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I'm your king!
PEASANT: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses! -- not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
KEN WAIGHT: I just kind of borrowed it as a little bit of a metaphor for the absurdity of partisanship in politics, and it seemed obscure and kind of fun, so I went with that.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Ken, thank you very much.
KEN WAIGHT: All right, well thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Ken Waight runs the web site LyingInPonds.Com that measures the partisanship of columnists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. [MONTY PYTHON CLIP PLAYS]
PEASANT: [...?...] all [...?...] round saying I was an emperor - just because some moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me?! They'd put me away!
KING ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up?!
PEASANT: Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
KING ARTHUR: Shut up!
PEASANT: Oh-- [SHOUTING] Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
KING ARTHUR: [SHOUTING] Bloody peasant!
PEASANT: Oh! What a giveaway -- did you hear that? Did you hear that? Eh?