See NY Times
This comment from our Kiwi Correspondent:
Foreign journalists will be particularly charmed to learn that their sentiments about the US are being computer-synthesized into simple positive or negative digitized conclusions. A thing observed is a thing changed, as the axiom has it. The thing in this case is infinitesimal : high opinion of America. It is likely to be changed. Negatively.
Admitting at the outset that this initiative —if focused on the US press— would be of questionable legality and unquestioned impropriety, the project’s leaders have announced that it is only the foreign media that will be monitored. The demeaning arrogance in that may be lost only on those doing the study. The rest of the world
will be understandably offended. Might not that offense reasonably be expected to adversely affect the opinions held of the US?
But, ok, say the project produces a sort of relief map of global regard for America, what does the existence of that mapping data imply? One implication of quantifying and locating low opinion is that corrective action could be targeted. If that meant Congress and US politicians responded by considering the substance and rationale
behind the opinion, then maybe some positive response could be fashioned. US policy could be informed and shaped to take account of other potentially useful perspectives. Alternatively the way policies were being presented could be adjusted to address perceived
short comings. By design, however, this project appears to eliminate those possibilities by cutting out of the equation any rationale supporting the opinion. The initiative is structured only to measure opinion not substance, conclusion not argument. So what sort of “corrective action” will flow from the compilation of that data?
As it creates data that identifies and claims to quantify “a problem “it will also create pressures to “solve” that alleged problem. The methodology of the initiative actually precludes development of internal solutions and thereby makes “external” solutions more likely. Fashioning external solutions here means finding ways of silencing critics rather than refuting them. Defeating them rather than considering them. Reacting rather than listening.
The foreseeable result of this un-needed, self-defeating, and divisive initiative will include pressures for disinformation campaigns, for buying off corruptible journalists and interdicting a free press in the very places we are urging policies of enlightened democratic transformation.