Pundit Boxscore for Wednesday 19 November 2003

PAUL KRUGMAN 2001: Last year I went back and evaluated Paul Krugman's 2000 columns in response to reader interest. After recently evaluating Ann Coulter's 2002 columns, I decided to go ahead and complete the dataset of Mr. Krugman's New York Times columns by also evaluating his columns from 2001. Thanks must go to Bobby Pelgrift, who maintains a complete set of Mr. Krugman's columns and other material on The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive.

Here then is Paul Krugman's 2001 page, which may be compared with similar pages for 2000, 2002 and his current page for 2003. His Combined Partisanship Index for 2001 was 78, extremely high compared to almost all other pundits evaluated here, and very similar to 2002 and 2003. Here is a brief analysis:

1. The most striking trend in the Krugman record is the almost total disappearance of "non-political" columns, those with no references at all to parties or politicians. As the figure below shows, Mr. Krugman wrote 52 such columns in his first year at the Times, mostly concerning economics. With only two non-political columns this year, it's clear that his writing has become mostly polemical, and I would argue, extremely partisan.

   

2. 2001 was the year in which Mr. Krugman's controversial views on the cause of the California energy crisis were substantially vindicated, demonstrating the value of having an award-winning economist writing about economic issues with depth and understanding.
3. I've argued previously that much can be learned from the reaction of various pundits to political scandals, particularly those which reflect badly on their own parties. Paul Krugman is an excellent example -- he pounded relentlessly on Republicans involved in the Enron scandal in 2002 (saying that "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."), yet gave a pass to Democrats involved in similar financial shenanigans, unlike the far more balanced treatment of his colleague Frank Rich. Even a non-economic Republican scandal such as the Trent Lott affair in 2002 received unusually intense coverage from Mr. Krugman, who predicted that Mr. Lott would get a "slap on the wrist" but remain in his position of Senate leadership. Yet the 2001 record shows that Mr. Krugman responded very differently when confronted with a Democratic scandal. The Marc Rich pardon controversy which arose as Bill Clinton left office in 2001 didn't merit a single mention, despite criticism from across the political spectrum. The point is not that Mr. Krugman must write about every scandal with equal intensity, but that the partisan pattern over several years is obvious -- he showers attention on stories negative to Republicans, while virtually ignoring those negative to Democrats.
4. I would argue that a columnist most clearly displays their intellectual independence when they are willing to sit down and write an entire column which unambiguously either criticizes their own party or praises the other. For columnists with the highest partisanship scores, these kind of substantive "crossover columns" are very rare. Ann Coulter, for example, has had no crossover columns this year, and the few columns in 2002 which criticized the Bush administration were aimed mostly at Norman Mineta, probably not coincidentally the only Democrat in the Bush cabinet. Substantive crossover columns have been nonexistent in the four years of Mr. Krugman's Times punditry. Of the 371 columns Mr. Krugman has written, only three were scored as nominally leaning toward Republicans, two in 2001. One such column has a single, offhand negative reference to Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, and the other had positive Republican references to both Gordon Smith and Rudolph Giuliani, but the column was actually aimed at the head of the nominally-nonpartisan Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (coming in under the Lying in Ponds radar, not counted as partisan references), and "the indifference of his superiors". The sheer difficulty of writing 371 consecutive columns without a single substantive crossover column can hardly be overemphasized -- not a single column devoted to criticism, however mild, of Bill Clinton or Al Gore or Howard Dean or Al Sharpton or any other Democrat -- not a single column devoted to praise, however mild, of Colin Powell or John McCain or any other Republican. Mr. Krugman's colleagues at the Times, Maureen Dowd and William Safire, are sometimes criticized as partisan, yet it's easy to find columns in which they cross partisan lines. It's revealing that defenders of Mr. Krugman invariably point to his Democratic criticism in the early years of the Clinton administration, nearly a decade ago.

I can't do any better than The Economist, in a current article which links to Lying in Ponds, in describing the great strengths and weaknesses of Paul Krugman:

What is beyond dispute is that Mr Krugman is the finest economist to become a media superstar -- at least since Milton Friedman or, earlier, John Maynard Keynes turned to journalism. Mr Krugman's work on currency crises and international trade is widely admired by other economists. He holds the John Bates Clark medal in economics, which is slightly harder to get than a Nobel prize. As for popularity, his new book, "The Great Unravelling" -- his eighth aimed at a broad, non-academic readership -- has spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Economist, which itself has been known on occasion to clamber off the economic fence, can hardly criticise anybody for writing hard-hitting (yet engaging and accessible!) economic analyses. But, increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist -- most notably in recognising, long before most other commentators, that market manipulation played a role in the California energy crisis -- perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.