EDITORIAL PAGE STUDY FILLED WITH NONSENSE AND BIAS

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Michael Tomasky has written a notable critique of conservative and liberal editorial pages -- notable, that is, for its pretentious idiocy. His paper, written when he was a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, is ``Whispers and Screams: The Partisan Natures of Editorial Pages'' (www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/index.htm).

His conclusions are that conservative papers were far more likely to praise the current Bush administration than the liberal papers were to praise the Clinton administration; and conservatives were far less likely than liberals to criticize the president each presumably agreed with.

For all I know that could be true, but I fail to see that it signifies anything. Though Tomasky believes it's because conservative papers are more partisan, the reason could equally well be that Bush is an effective leader and Clinton was a singularly inept president. With such a small sample, how could you tell?

Tomasky chose four papers for his study, The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal to represent conservative papers and The Washington Post and The New York Times to represent liberal papers. He chose two presidents, George W. Bush and Clinton. And finally, he chose 10 issues that he regarded as ``roughly comparable.'' For example, on policy, he compares editorial reactions to the Bush tax cuts and the Clinton tax increases (which, oddly, he describes as a ``stimulus'' package). In the category he calls ``politics/process,'' for instance, he compares Bush's nomination of Linda Chavez for secretary of labor and Clinton's nomination of Zoe Baird for attorney general.

Let me pause to point out something alert readers may already have noticed; in each of these pairings, conservative/liberal, Bush/Clinton, or in the ordering of the papers, I have put the conservative side first -- not because that is the natural order of things, but because Tomasky uniformly does the reverse. I don't know whether he did that on purpose or whether it never occurred to him, but it is quite striking.

In the end he had 510 editorials to evaluate as positive, negative or mixed (as he does not say, that's out of more than 40,000 editorials published in these four papers during the period of the research). What does it all amount to? Not much.

First, there's the choice of papers. The Post and The New York Times are major big-city dailies, both aspiring to a national audience through their wire services. The Journal is a business paper; of course it writes about politics, indeed it rollicked through the unending sleaze of the Clinton administration with unrestrained glee, but ultimately it sees issues through an economic filter. The Washington Times is a scrappy little paper, overtly political, but hardly heard of outside Washington.

It's not that there would have been a better choice of papers; rather, the absence of a better choice should have been a warning that the project was hopeless from the start.

Second, there's the choice of topics. It was necessarily limited. As Tomasky says, sounding rueful, ``There has been no Bush-administration equivalent to Whitewater or the travel-office firings or any of the other flare-ups that were such a persistent feature of the Clinton administration.'' And, he says, one can't really compare Clinton's intervention in Kosovo with Bush's war in Iraq because Kosovo was ``a mere air war.''

Trouble is, the topics he does choose to compare aren't really comparable either. In what way is Bush's executive order limiting stem-cell research like Clinton's veto of a bill banning partial-birth abortion? Bush is queasy about the destruction of human embryos before they reach the stage of implantation in the uterus; Clinton was defending the execution of babies, minutes before they're born, by sucking their brains out of their skulls.

Tomasky is politically on the left, but that in itself doesn't invalidate his work; that would be an ad hominem argument, and ad hominem is a fallacy. However, his views are relevant in that if you don't share them, his comparisons don't make much sense.

He takes the conservative papers to task for their harsh language. After quoting a particularly vitriolic bit from the Journal, he sniffs, ``That sort of language does not appear on the liberal pages.''

Well, no, but that's a problem, not a virtue. If I were to indulge in Tomaskian analysis, I would say it is because liberals are instinctively collectivists, so naturally they must expunge every trace of an individual voice from their editorials, while conservative papers celebrate individualism. But frankly, I don't think that's it at all. The New York Times and the Post are stuffy because they think it makes them sound important.

Finally, Tomasky says that the conservative papers take the positions they do because they are partisan, that is, to support the party they prefer. That may be true -- and there is no harm if it is -- but there is no way he could know it from what they write. That is not, after all, an argument they make. He is judging them by the motives he attributes to them -- and that is the classic ad hominem fallacy.