In my effort to diversify my political news reading, I’ve been occasionally seeing articles from conservative sites. Some of them have a pretty neat feature: they tell you right after an elected politician’s name whether you should like or hate them via a site called “Conservative Review” with the feature being called the “Liberty Score.”
Now, political reporting has long included a tag of loyalty (“Jon Smith (R-America)”), but this new-fangled tag shows just how committed to everything conservative an individual is, in the form of a percentage. So you can see, reading an article on a site using this that, for example, Ted Cruz is 97% conservative. They don’t say what he’s 3%, but we’ll just assume it’s bad. Or, you can see that Bernie Sanders, at 17%… wait, 16% (did it just change while I was typing this?) is practically an unperson by conservative standards.
They give the letter grade, too, if you hover over it. Sanders gets an F, which is basically a participation trophy. Liberty-lovers are supposed to hate participation trophies, though. But there it is: Sanders <(Participation Trophy Recipient) right there by his name, when you hover.
All of this is a sophisticated method for avoiding phrasing like, “Bernie Sanders (pinko) said…” or “Hillary Clinton (infidel) …” That sort of stuff, outright saying what your side thinks of the other, happens, but there is a risk that people will have to read what you write. With the little fancy number tags, which will probably be replaced with signal-strength-style bars soon, they just have to look at that bit. Maybe happy-face, frowny-face. I’m sure they’re focus-grouping it.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: is this the forehead (or back-of-the-hand) stamp that we were warned about by that fancy book with the talk of dragons and God? The mark of the beast? Don’t worry! I am sure there’s some eschatological site that is currently using similar technology to markup their texts and the Liberty Score probably only rates about 10% as a sign of the end of days (they get a participation trophy for their participation trophies).
Point is, this is great for journalism. You’ll soon be able to log on, click a donkey or an elephant, and have all your news done with emoticons. You’ll be given either a rifle mouse cursor (for the conservatives) to shoot the enemy, or a picket mouse cursor (for the liberals) to protest the enemy long enough that they flee.
Maybe they could give the Clinton and Sanders supporters some validation-failed stamps for their latest circling on who isn’t qualified to be president.
On a more honest note, though, boiling the totality of a person down to a number is best left to the financial industry. It has no place in political reporting. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see it being done.