Here's what NPR's own website says about their federal funding:
"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
"Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)"
"The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution."
"Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism—especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities."
Besides the fact that they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government the bigger issue is that of editorial control and NPR is pretty clean as far as I can see. Unlike most of the other entities labeled 'State Affiliated Media'.
Naming NPR in one breath with those others is intentionally tarnishing them and playing to the crowd, which is something that Elon has been engaging in in a very specific manner since he took over Twitter. Trying to suggest that this is appropriate is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people jumping in to defend Musk in the most weird ways.
I don't see Tesla's account labelled as State Affiliated and yet, if we were to judge solely by the amount of funds received they would qualify long before NPR would.
> they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government
There are at least two ways they get government funding:
- direct funding from the federal government
- payment from member stations (at least 31% of revenue) who are themselves supported by government funding
Without looking at the funding sources of each NPR member station, it's hard to come up with a good estimate, but it's probably a double digit percentage, which exceeds what I consider 'tiny'.
Because not all government funding is federal funding.
Random example from an NPR member station's web site:
KCRW is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture. The Department's Organizational Grant Program helps fund a wide variety of arts, culture, and music programs that you hear on air each day!
I apologize for my imprecise language. The 13% I quoted includes "Federal, state and local governments". Again this is all on the web page we're all discussing, in a very easy-to-understand chart.
Thank you for the number. In context, the EU is 15% of revenue for most ad based tech platforms, and its regulation has shown unbounded control over them.
NPR has a history of downplaying their government funding, I'm not sure if you should use them as your main source. I know in the past they've said it was around 5%, while independent investigations found it was closer to 20-40%
That's the source we're discussing here. If you have some evidence that they're lying about this then please post it, I would genuinely be interested to see it.
If I'm giving you a regular flow of money that keeps you well fed and housed in a nice area, you're going to at least subconsciously care about how I perceive you and if I approve of the things you're doing, because I have the power to cut off that flow of money at any time.
This is why many wealthy individuals and organizations donate to both political parties. The implicit threat of losing a flow of money you've become accustomed to is more powerful that the vague promise of a new flow of money that you can currently live without.
Old money and power don't control things with a loud command, but with a subtle flash of facial displeasure.
Show how the NPR is pulling their punches when they report on the Federal government and I'll consider it. But from where I'm sitting - far outside of the USA - they offer some of the most balanced and clean reporting out there (and that includes the BBC).
I agree with your perception. There are many within the US that simply have a different window of what they find to be acceptable sources, topics, and opinions to entertain. The word 'balanced' implies a sort of central tendency, which can vary depending on what someone finds worthy of consideration.
They aren’t even slightly balanced anymore, especially their radio stuff. They took a hard turn left after Trump was nominated. They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. I didn’t hear a single positive thing about anything the Trump administration did during his presidency, only after the last election. You can’t turn on your local station without hearing some identity politics within a few minutes - either from them or NPR itself. They often only have one “side” being interviewed for their reporting.
It just so happens that Republicans want to pull their funding and Democrats don’t. That’s a bit of a chicken or the egg type situation.
It’s sad because they used to be pretty good, and were probably the last bastion of somewhat balanced reporting in our country.
So you thought they were pretty good until Trump came along and then they did a hard left? Have you considered the possibility that they didn't change at all and that their reporting was on the money?
People that urgently want to believe the Hunter Biden laptop story was somehow relevant tend to be hardliner Trump supporters and I find it hard to see how if that is their perspective they could be convinced that Trump has been a disaster for US politics if they haven't come to that conclusion on their own by now.
Think about it: Republicans want to pull their funding. Why would that be? Because they are reporting the facts and that is inconvenient to them? Or for some non-partisan reason that I'm currently unaware of? There is this quote by Colbert: "Reality has a left wing bias" or something to that effect. NPR reporting leans 'left' only if you are far to the right of center. For the rest of the world - me included - it is still center or center right depending on the context.
They should not be receiving public funds if they are going to continue to produce ideologically inclined content. At this point, they are no different than a little neoliberal/progressive think tank. And an honest assessment of the content means that they lean heavily to the left.
I'm far from a Trump supporter - I don't consider myself to be a republican or a democrat. I like some policies from one side and some from the other, and I think in a lot of instances (like abortion) a compromise would be best instead of fully one way or the other.
I think Trump getting elected made a lot of people on the left that felt they had some "power" over elections feel like they somehow failed. Keep in mind how scared they were. This American Life did a show on how Trump could basically launch nukes whenever he wanted, for instance. We had years of "Russian collusion." Suddenly it became their mission to not only ensure it didn't happen again, but their opinion of republicans radically shifted.
If you can't tell that NPR is hard on the left then it's you who is off of the charts politically. The way they've treated the Trump administration vs the Biden administration is absolutely laughable.
This is all anecdotal, but this one hits home for me. As a longtime NPR supporter well before the 2016 election, I wholeheartedly agree with all your comments. There was a drastic change leading up to that 2016 mess. We shouldn't forget the comment section was shut down in 2015 as well. An abstraction layer was added to it as a solution, but it really seemed to take away from the site as there were a lot of great discussions and debates taking place.
I'm fairly anti-Trump myself, but he never lived in my head rent free - a spade is a spade. The bias can be heard within minutes of tuning in, which I still do every time I'm in the car. I treat it just like I do CNN or Fox, which is with a grain of salt.
All that being said, there is still a lot of really awesome content coming from them. This American Life is still one of my all time favorites.
> Polls have demonstrated that if the public had known the full extent of the laptop revelations they may have voted differently.
How the public reacts to news is precisely why you have to have some restraint as a news editor. Because if you don't have restraint you end up being James Comey.
> Polls have demonstrated that if the public had known the full extent of the laptop revelations (among them that Hunter calls Biden “Pedo Peter”) they may have voted differently.
“May have” is exactly what the complete absence of any evidence gives you, so this is basically saying “polls have provided no useful information to differentiate this counterfactual from any other counterfactual”.
> They took a hard turn left after Trump was nominated.
This would seemingly support that they are less than state controlled; The idea that the executive branch, the senate majority, and the house majority would be criticized by a state sponsored media in recent history suggests independence.
> They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Because reporting on bullshit doesn't make you balanced. Balance isn't being in the middle of extremes, especially when the mainstream of politics in America for one party has gone off the rails.
Every political administration in the history of forever has had good policies and bad policies.
He did a lot as far as medical pricing, forcing hospitals to have price transparency. Medications were also supposed to have pricing listed on their commercials - and did for a short while. It looks like the courts blocked it, from a quick Google. Regardless of whether you think tax cuts are a good thing, increasing the standard deduction made tax season a lot easier for many people.
Personally I think clamping down on illegal immigration is a good thing, though some may disagree. I've literally never heard one single word from NPR about any negatives from unchecked illegal immigration, but many, many, many sob stories from the other direction.
So, there's some examples. I find that most people that hate a politician mostly do it because they're on the wrong side. My wife's parents and sister were just railing against Desantis, even though they probably know very few of his policies as we're on the other side of the country - and what they do know are probably one-sided things from their preferred news sources.
And Hitler was a vegetarian. No amount of supposed "good" outweighs the absolute evil of the man. The same applies to Trump. The man is out-and-out Anti-American and is almost literally the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. I don't give a crap if her personally saved 1000 puppies from dying in a fire. It doesn't outweigh the rest of his actions.
Ah yes. The definitely real story of a man abandoning his laptop at a repair shop (which apparently had no way to contact him to pick up said laptop?), where once the laptop was abandoned the shop owner (rather than wiping and selling the computer) read through his emails and found some definitely real incriminating evidence that was super believable? It should tell you something that even Fox wasn't willing to run the story at first.
> His father flew him on Air Force 2 to China to make private equity deals.
Shouldn't have happened if he was doing business there. Also, again, where is your proof? I Googled it but all I could find was a claim Trump made while campaigning:
"We have found no evidence to contradict that, and Trump hasn’t provided any. We also found no evidence that Joe Biden used his position as vice president to enrich his son."
But considering Trump's son in law was doing this while in office:
”In 2013, Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two with his father, who was then vice-president, on an official visit to Beijing, where the younger Biden met investment banker Jonathan Li.”
The google bubble strikes again? Maybe it's only showing you what you want to see. Try DuckDuckGo it seems less prone at ideologically memory holing news stories.
> Come on, wake up and smell the coffee. The business partner Bobulinski also considered it to be meaning Biden in an interview in mainstream media.
Again, this is not proof. You clearly want this to be true, therefore you don't need evidence. I can't "wake up" as you have, because I don't have the motivation to believe it the way you do. True things are awarded the title of true because they can be proven, with evidence. Not because they confirm the beliefs you already held.
Whoever Bobulinski is, you are quoting his public statements, which aren't under oath, where there is actual penalty for lying. He did sit with the FBI, but then he made a tour of right wing media making unrelated statements (as far as we know), which makes this a politically motivated PR campaign, nothing more. If he had given the FBI something to act on, they would have done so. They have no qualms about influencing elections:
> ”In 2013, Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two with his father, who was then vice-president, on an official visit to Beijing, where the younger Biden met investment banker Jonathan Li.”
Right, he was on the plane. That's what is confirmed. You made specific accusations that appears to have come from Trump himself, which it goes without saying is not a trustworthy source. Who confirmed nature of the "deals" he made? What were they, when did they occur, and how do we know Joe Biden was involved? Actual evidence please.
Regardless, it has raised questions about conflicts of interest and impartiality. Its a broader problem than just the Bidens or democrats, we see this shit under every president. The whole US political system is steeped in this corruption and influence peddling.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and is in a pond with a bunch of other ducks, do we really need a court case to prove its a duck?
Do you not see how this is editorializing? They refuse to cover story having to do with the son of the Democratic candidate. And they pretended the story was not real.
1. The data/emails were most likely stolen and the media was trying not to make the same mistake as reporting DNC hacked emails, which was a Russian intelligence operation.
2. Hunter Biden is not a politician, unlike the Trump kids (who are all hopeless cocaine addicts but no one seems to care) he never worked in the White House. And there's 0 proof Biden was a part of any of Hunter's bullshit. So outside of muckraking and dirty politics, there was nothing newsworthy about it.
> 1. The data/emails were most likely stolen and the media was trying not to make the same mistake as reporting DNC hacked emails, which was a Russian intelligence operation.
This is a complete assumption on their part if that happened. Instead of researching and taking time to assess the finding, they assume foul play. Why does it happen conveniently when the Democrat Joe Biden would suffer from investigating this clearly? Why would they assume it was stolen? Why would they assume it was Russian disinfo? Do you not see the clear profile of ideological politicing at play here? It's all conveniently explained away and meanwhile they get to keep playing politics and pretending to be bipartisan.
> 2. Hunter Biden is not a politician, unlike the Trump kids (who are all hopeless cocaine addicts but no one seems to care) he never worked in the White House. And there's 0 proof Biden was a part of any of Hunter's bullshit. So outside of muckraking and dirty politics, there was nothing newsworthy about it.
So being a cocaine addict is newsworthy when it's the Trump kids but not when its a Biden kid?
>So outside of muckraking and dirty politics, there was nothing newsworthy about it.
Strong disagree. This is exactly the thing that muckraking should uncover. Again, if this was about a Trump kid, everyone would want to know and investigate it. Including you and me.
This is quite a terrible take, considering the story has been proven to be true. Your sarcastic tone really annoys me since the media spent half a year, pretending the story wasn’t real.
I fully stand behind the NPR on this. I think the Hunter Biden laptop story is and was a distraction, and that the lives of family members of politicians should be off-limits for news coverage, positive or negative until they themselves insert themselves into the political arena. Let's face it squarely: the only reason why this story was blown up as much as it was was because it was used to damage his father politically, not because there was anything of substance there.
The lives of family members of politicians and government employees should be completely on-limits for news coverage, provided that could be newsworthy, because using one's family is one method of laundering corruption.
Let's say for example you need a permit approved by the CITYNAME Department of Buildings. CITYNAME is slow to process permit applications, but it is common knowledge that using a particular expeditor consulting company actually helps to get your permit approved quickly. It would definitely be newsworthy if that consulting company was owned by a spouse, sibling, parent, cousin, etc. of someone in the building department. I personally know someone who was not able to open up a store in a city I lived because the inspector literally said something was deficient and recommended some local company nearby to "fix it" for approximately $50,000.
It is a similar reason why working in an investment bank, at least in the US, you have to agree that both you and your close family members must agree to trading restrictions so as not to pose a conflict of interest with any of the bank's clients. If such a restriction was not in place, then it would be easy to just pass insider information to your spouse or brother and have them make money based on news that is about to be announced.
Yes, using one's family can be used to launder money. But it can also be used to smear others. And because of that some prudence is required. And since all of the facts on that particular case have come out by now - or at least, given the ones that did come out without knowing whether or not that is exhaustive - I'd say the NPR made the right call.
It is unfortunate that the news would have been too close to the election, so I have some understanding why some news organizations handled the story they did.
I liken this to the Google, and other tech companies, interviewing process. It is better to miss out on a good hire, than hire (or elect) someone that was a false positive for good. So based on reasonable doubt or suspicion, a story like this should cause anyone connected to be considered not a good choice for government employment anywhere since it could cause the US to be taken advantage of by any relevant other countries.
They didn't just pass on the story, they put out negative commentary about it by calling it a distraction without even bothering to explain how they arrived at that.
> The article said that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including five CIA chiefs, had signed a letter saying the release of the emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
And that’s why our intelligence apparatus is not a trusted source. Individuals within this institution are willing to game their status for reputation and sell it to the highest bidder. Look how the Pentagon is handling the leak of the Ukrainian papers, not to mention corporate journalist condemning the leak.
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That includes remaining respectful at all times, avoiding flamewar, name-calling, and snark, as well as other things you'll find there.
>I'm trying to tell you that your writing is unintelligible.
You're free to ask me what point is giving you trouble.
>I don't believe you. You know all his talking points by heart.
Trump vomits more foul content than any person I know. But okay. Gatekeep hating Trump. Weird flex though.
>See my first point.
Nice dodge. I'm starting to think I pulled all the wind out of sails since I wasn't just some run of the mill trumptard. Do you admit that? I'm giddy with anticipation.
>I still don't believe you, and I'm bored with this, goodbye.
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> the only reason why this story was blown up as much as it was was because it was used to damage his father politically, not because there was anything of substance there.
Have you reviewed all of the information contained on said laptop? How can you state an opinion and present it as a fact? Do you have any data or evidence that the data contained within the laptop was compromised or had “lack of substance?”
Right you haven’t. You present your opinion as fact as you have throughout this thread. I’d ask that YOU please stop pushing your opinion as fact when it is just your opinion.
The burden of proof justifying posting stolen materials from the laptop belonging to the family member of a politician is not on the person asking if this is in bounds, it is on the person defending obvious muckraking.
The people making the claims about the laptop are the ones that need to provide evidence. To date, nothing of substance has been released from the laptop (which has supposedly been in the possession of the parties making the claims for at least 3 years) that validates any of the claims that have been made about the laptop, Hunter Biden, or Joe Biden.
> To date, nothing of substance has been released from the laptop (which has supposedly been in the possession of the parties making the claims for at least 3 years) that validates any of the claims that have been made about the laptop, Hunter Biden, or Joe Biden.
The evidence is there for anyone to view it. Just because the media doesn’t seem interested doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be interested. Just because the media doesn’t report on it doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting story.
Here is evidence from the laptop. Sure we can poke holes and say there was no “chain of custody” but if CoC didn’t matter for an election ballots why does it matter here? Just take an unbiased view of the data. Disregard the source and form you own opinion. Without actually looking at the data anything said is an assumption.
Again I may not like the source but I don’t tend to shoot the messenger.
That is not evidence. What is the crime that has supposedly been committed and what is the evidence that supports that accusation?
Dumping the contents of a laptop and then shouting conspiracies isn't the same as making a claim and then providing evidence for it.
The media doesn't seem interested because there's nothing there. If there was, Fox News, Breitbart, and all the others would be all over it and pushing it daily.
The media seemed to care when the narrative was 51 IC members says the laptop has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Hell every network ran with that lie and bullshit. Even twitter was involved and we can see the fallout within the twitter files. Some retracted. Some updated when the laptop and data was deemed “authentic”.
It wasn't a lie, though. The supposed smoking gun wasn't there. That's still a classic earmark of a Russian disinformation operation. You take something real and apply something false to it. The laptop may have been real but that doesn't mean that the supposed crimes and other conspiracies surrounding it were real.
That's how I know it's BS and you can't dispute it. The laptop and data can be authentic all day long. You still can't name a crime that it shows evidence of.
Nope it was definitely a lie. Corporate journalist along with their connections in our intelligence institutions colluded to tarnish and bury the story before an election before it had a chance to be assessed properly. I understand not believing the story to begin with and even believing that there was no incriminating content within the laptop (other than Hunter’s dysfunctional life), but there was definitely a campaign to bury the story so that it would not affect Joe Biden’s chances of being elected. The campaign was to call it Russian disinformation. Do you at least admit this much?
No... not at all. If that was true, then why didn't FOX News, Breitbart, or any of the other right-wing media outlets show evidence of these supposed crimes? Why would FOX News bury the story to not affect Biden's chances of being elected? That doesn't even make any sense.
Do you think those 51 IC member would have called it a Russian Disinformation Operation of the laptop was Don Jr? Well I guess that narrative wouldn’t work, since the Democrats have been pounding the drum that Trump was a Putin “puppet”.
I don’t even need to pontificate how the media would have handled it. They would have dug through all the “evidence” and try to find more “crimes”.
The fact is the IC community and Media colluded to bury the story. There was no interest other than the fringe to actually dig through it.
Hell the FBI has been sitting on the laptop for YEARS. It’s not hard to see how these institutions favor one party over another. Time and time again.
> It was not a lie. Unless you can prove that any of these claims are true, it wasn't a lie.
You can keep downvoting me. It’s okay.
Hunter admitted to his drug addiction. Hunter lied on the background check when purchasing a fire arm. The FBI attempted to strong arm the Gun Store Owner after Hallie took Hunters illegal firearm and dumped in a trash can at a supermarket.
There’s plenty of evidence of Hunter’s drug problems and evidence of illegal cocaine usage (unless cocaine and crack are legal and I missed it) Yet no formal charges.
I wonder why?
President Joe Biden conceded that his son Hunter lied on a government form when he purchased a handgun in October 2018—a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The younger Biden was a crack cocaine user at the time, as recounted in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things. Yet he answered no to this question on ATF Form 4473: "Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?"
Hunter Biden's laptop is a non-story unless you really care about penises for some reason. Or Russian disinformation. What exactly was the laptop supposed to prove?
discussing incentives is understandable (even though your analogy doesn't fit because the government's minor funding isn't what's keeping NPR funded)
suggesting that actual impropriety or improper influence occurs as a result is a conspiracy theory, and we'd need to see actual evidence that it actually happened to avoid dismissing it out of hand
I think if you study this and read up on, for example, the Trump administration's attempts to turn VoA into a compliant propaganda outfit via the administration's control of USAGM, you might conclude that it's actually really hard to manipulate public media in this way. It's not a perfect system but it's pretty well designed.
Why else do they get this source of funding that other networks don't have? (Though this is still just a theory and not reason to slap "govt-affiliated" on them. "Govt-funded" is fair.)
You should look into their origin story if you want an answer. And no, Govt-Funded is also not fair absent an indication of editorial control. The BBC in the UK, the NOS in NL, NPR in the United States, and so on are all official channels but they also have their own editorial staff and only in very rare cases does the government directly intervene in the production (and usually simultaneously on other channels as well). So this is simply Elon playing stupid games, which he seems to be very good at.
NPR was created after the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 aiming to increase public education through media, which doesn't really answer my question.
> Govt-Funded is also not fair absent an indication of editorial control
They get this source of funding because that is how they were created and entities that were created through a different mechanism (for instance: to become the mouthpiece for a political stream or for commercial reasons) are a different kind of animal.
The government allocates funds to many things that it may consider useful, such as health care, infrastructure and education. This does not necessarily imply that the government does this to create a mechanism of influence, as opposed to their counterparts in countries that are run as dictatorships. Naming the NPR in the same breath as the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean state media is mistaken at best and maliciously dishonest at worst. Knowing what I know about Musk it is a fair bet we're looking at the latter.
It should be under the same label as BBC, just govt-funded. Up to you what you think of that. State-affiliated means definite editorial control. Syria etc call those outlets education too.
Primarily, because NPR affiliate stations service areas where there aren't incentives for private stations. Meaning, without these public radio stations, these areas would be without news and the entertainment broadcasting NPR provides.
This isn't true for stations like WNYC, but it is true for much of the US.
The small affiliates need subsidies, because it costs a lot to run the stations.
NPR has done like, a million segments on this. It's interesting stuff. Easy to learn about!
No I'm referring to them having open discussions about their logic for continuing to receive funding. They don't really do "explanations" with regards to their own operations, general it is a discussion about what is going on. They are a pretty transparent organization.
I don't have evidence of federal editorial control over NPR, nor does anyone have evidence of the absence, which is why I say that only "govt-funded" is a fair label.
I was so surprised by the first statement in your comment, that I stopped reading right there, and searched online to see if I could confirm/deny the statement. Then I wrote a reply without reading the rest of your comment.
That's the thing that matters. The funding isn't relevant, but making a ruckus about the funding is the tool through which Musk has plausible deniability that this was ever about editorial control. It is factually correct but conveys no information other than misdirection and you are falling for it hook, line and sinker. NPR has a lot of staffers, want to bet that at least a number of them have prior government employment on their CVs? Want to bet that some of them will leave NPR for government? That too would be utterly irrelevant, but you could make a nice argument about it and maybe even prove it to be factually correct. In the end it's all just noise and no signal.
State affiliated media are those media institutions that are editorially controlled by the nation state where they are based, and funding is secondary to that by a very large distance.
I haven't made any statement (nor drawn any conclusion) about whether NPR's content is controlled or influenced by any level of government. So I'm not sure what I've fallen for?
I've only talked about funding. That may be irrelevant, but I only talked about it in response to something you brought up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The whole point is that this discussion is the result of a label that is applied maliciously, focusing on the label and/or the accuracy of the label misses the point: the label should not have been applied because historically it has been applied on entities that are vastly different from the NPR. So now you have to wonder why it was applied, instead of trying to figure out if it applies or not.
> So now you have to wonder why it was applied, instead of trying to figure out if it applies or not.
Now the question is whether you are willing to apply the same analysis to Twitter's decision to apply its "Hacked Materials Policy" in 2020 in order to block any discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Asking this question is the only way of determining whether a person is acting from a truly principled position, or whether they are using situational ethics.
The only true principle is one that binds your allies and your opponents equally. If it only applies to your opponents, then it's merely a rationalization.
I'm interested in finding like-minded people who are committed to applying principles equally. It's the only way of mediating conflict that does not devolve into pure tribalism. Unfortunately few people seem to be interested.
I think you will find that dragging in unrelated subjects isn't going to help make your argument because you are trying to find purchase on the individuals that you are talking to rather than to discuss the subject matter.
Applying principles equally implies that the subjects are comparable, which may be the case in your world view but you will find that your worldview rarely if ever overlaps the worldview of another person. So instead of trying to match worldviews we discuss topics individually of each other so that there is room for less than 100% black/white differentiation. Given two subjects that two people may or may not agree on there will be four populations of results given a large enough sample size. Whether you believe that those people are able to rationally apply their own principles or not isn't really the question the question is whether they believe that they are doing so and cherry picking your subjects doesn't give you more grip on their worldview, it only serves to reinforce your own.
By looking at each case individually. Rules are fun to make but tend to not work as soon as things get a bit more complicated. That's why we don't just have laws but also judges.
Judges do the opposite of looking at each case individually. The overriding principle of common law jurisdictions is stare decisis, which is to apply principles consistently according to precedent.
For my part, I look at this as an iterated prisoner's dilemma. I want to live in a society that values fairness and equal protection above all, even when that means conceding things that I would prefer not to concede if I was acting in pure self-interest.
I'll be honest, at a base level it amuses me to see Twitter label NPR as "Government-funded media," and to see NPR get mad about it. But because I want to live in a fair society, I'm willing to set that base feeling aside, and take really seriously the question of whether this is truly fair or merely the petty and arbitrary actions of an unprincipled billionaire.
But this deal only works if the other side is willing to do the same. And I have seen too many rounds of this iterated prisoner's dilemma where the other side is happy to take the W when it benefits them.
If I ally with the people criticizing Musk, but those same people are not willing to cooperate in pursuit of fairness when power benefits them, then I am in the loser quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. No thanks.
So unless I see critics of Musk appeal to general principles that they are willing to stand up for, across the board, I just get out my popcorn and enjoy the show.
>- payment from member stations (at least 31% of revenue) who are themselves supported by government funding
I have a hard time understanding this as "state sponsored", much less as evidence that NPR has ceded editorial control. NPR estimates (and InfluenceWatch believes this estimate) that about 4% of their revenue ultimately comes from federal, state and local governments [0], via direct grants to NPR, and via grants to member stations that are in turn paid to NPR. InfluenceWatch, you'll note, is run by the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank which has an axe to grind about NPR's apparent left-wing bias.
This feels a lot like the accusations against Bellingcat that they are state-sponsored/controlled. And I think those accusations are equally specious. Accepting money via indirect grants is not at all the same as accepting payment for invoiced work.
Indeed. Meanwhile, the message has had its intended effect and NPR is now seen as 'tainted' by the people who would do a lot better to listen more to NPR than to various other far more biased news sources. It's the same old playbook, and Musk getting away with this is highly annoying.
If the public funding isn’t important to them, then don’t take it and become truly independent. Or keep the funding and be open about it.
I suspect most of NPR's followers are fine with their public funding, it's literally in the name. They're probably more upset about all their corporate funding.
Tesla’s funding is neither here nor there; it’s not a news outlet.
NPR needs money and they need editorial freedom, they seem to have both. I really can't fault them for that, editorial independence is the yardstick by which media should be judged unless there is outright ownership.
Money can be easily tracked. Editorial independence cannot be.
I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been. They know member donations are their biggest funding source, so they largely tell their audience what they want to hear.
Put another way, I don't think perfect editorial independence exists. Everyone knows where their bread is being buttered. Having a badge on Twitter saying you're independent would be entirely a judgement call.
> I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been.
I... don't know. When the topic comes up there sure are a lot of us NPR listeners who are in rather a love-hate relationship with it, leaning toward "hate". Half the time I'm listening I'm shaking my head at how very self-parody-like NPR they're being or yelling at them to stop doing such shitty coverage. Like, the best news on my local station, far and away, is when they rebroadcast BBC content. If I could tune into actual BBC stations when driving, I'd probably listen to that a lot more than NPR. These days especially, NPR's only got a very-few programs I'd bother to save from a fire, as it were, or that I even might go out of my way to listen to when not in the car.
It's just that there's not a lot of better news/commentary/talk programming on the radio dial.
I agree, but in many ways it's a product of syndication. When you get out of that influence (e.g., independently published podcasters) the scope of quality becomes _much_ broader.
I'm old enough to remember finding good-quality content on NPR, but I now look toward podcasts in the special interest I'm looking for to find good-quality audio-streamed information.
State funding of media, regardless of how it’s structured, creates an obvious conflict of interest with editorial freedom. Theoretically it’s possible for a state funded media company to exercise editorial freedom, just like it would be theoretically possible for a climate study funded by ExxonMobile to exercise academic freedom, but not without acknowledging that the conflict of interest exists. Maybe they are a high integrity organisation, but the existence of this conflict of interest isn’t really up for debate. Maybe it’s not necessary for any state funded media to be labelled on Twitter, but if you’re going to label any of it, then you should label all of it.
> State funding of media, regardless of how it’s structured, creates an obvious conflict of interest with editorial freedom.
How is this not true of any funding of media?
At least with government funding—even if there is outright editorial control—in a democratic country, you as a citizen have the ability to vote on how you think that funding and control should be exercised. Furthermore, it is massively easier to get laws in place that mandate transparency for government-funded entities than for private ones, so whatever influences there may be on their reporting would be much more visible.
The concern that media companies can have interests that don’t align with journalistic integrity does apply to any media company. Whenever you see Rupert Murdoch’s name being discussed, it’s probably in relation to this topic. However it is harmful in a unique way when the government creates a conflict of interest between editorial independence, and serving the states agenda, due to the way in which that undermines the principle that a democratic society requires freedom of the press.
The NPR makes no secret of its funding. But stamping a label on it like this implies that they are at the same level as the Chinese and Russian official state channels and lapdog institutions, which is the effect that Musk is going for here, which clearly is unfair to the NPR.
Any attempt to whitewash even aspects of it is in part giving credit to it and I'm just not going to carry Musk's water on this. It's a petty move by a petty person, who uses the platform that he bought to further his new best buddies interests by fomenting distrust in media institutions that he can't buy or control.
NPR has exactly the same conflict of interest in regards to funding that RT has. You can make your own judgements about how influential that conflict is for different outlets, but the existence of it cannot be denied. If you think labelling the conflict of interest is worthwhile (as other social media platforms also do), then you have to do it for all outlets that have it. Otherwise you’re revealing that you’re actually pursing some other alternative agenda.
Personally I think it’s a stupid idea in general. But that’s because I’m against any organisation attempting to establish itself as an authority over the concept of the truth.
NPR is not Stars and Stripes, Voice of America or even the BBC. Assuming 4% in direct government funding (from all levels) as estimated elsewhere in the thread, plus some amount in government subsidization of donations to a registered non-profit; the fiscal contributions from government is meaningful, but not sufficient to assume it biases coverage.
Stars and Stripes has a mix of funding, including about half its budget from the department of defense, but has editorial independence; although I imagine it's hard not to be influenced.
Even Voice of America has safeguards for editorial independence, although its budget is fully state funded.
Media companies receiving public funding is a conflict of interest with editorial independence, both RT and NPR receiving public funding. These are facts.
The fact is that the one is a state sponsored mouthpiece and the other is a editorially independent organization.
If you have proof that the NPR is a mouthpiece for the US government then now would be a fine time to provide it, otherwise it is just trying to throw shade in the exact same way that Elon Musk is trying to.
There are many reasons other than funding to criticize RT, but RT and NPR have the same conflict of interested created by their funding sources. If you’re not able to appreciate this very simple fact then I would highly suggest you engage in some self-reflection.
Funding doesn't have to be a conflict of interest depending on how it's organised. But Twitter's own definition of "state affiliated media" is not about funding, but about editorial control, where NPR is independent. Labeling NPR as "state affiliated" is clearly wrong according to Twitter's own definition.
put a better way, theoretically it's possible for an entity that has received a small amount of funds from the state, to be controlled by that state, just like SpaceX, which is state funded, could be controlled by that state, and just like theoretically I could give you a dollar and then control you, but any actual accusation of such or implication thereof would need actual evidence behind it, or else such conspiracy theories based only on incentives and no evidence can be dismissed out of hand.
No evidence of bias is required to establish that a conflict of interest exists. One reason that people are interested in knowing when a conflict of interest exists, is that is generally not possible to prove what influences are motivating decision making.
evidence of bias is required to establish bias, even if there's the appearance of a conflict of interest, which given the miniscule amount of funding in question here, doesn't even seem to be the case, either.
many conspiracy theorists will say that it's impossible to prove their conspiracy theory (in this case, any actual bias), but that's their problem, not the world's
maybe they can spend more time interviewing, investigating, doing statistical analysis, etc to find any evidence of their conspiracy theories, and less time just coming up with the theories?
I’m not alleging any bias. I’m stating that the funding model creates a conflict of interest, which is simply factually correct.
> given the miniscule amount of funding in question here, doesn't even seem to be the case
According to NPR themselves, federal funding is essential for their ongoing existence.
> Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.
> The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.
if there is no bias, there is no issue, even if there is the appearance of a conflict of interest, which given the small portion of funding in question here, there doesn't even seem to be
I’m not alleging there is no bias either. The reason that managing conflicting interests is important in the first place is because it’s not possible to objectively measure their influence.
There is also not an “appearance” of conflicting interests here. There is factually a conflicting interest between relying on an entity for funding, and an expectation that you’ll provide impartial media coverage of them.
This exists regardless of how small you think this reliance is. But even then, your attempt to minimise it is directly contradicted by NPR, who claim it is “essential” to their ability to operate.
I'm not alleging that you're alleging that there's no bias either, but either you have convincing evidence there is, or we fall back to there not being any until you do (and your claims that the conspiracy theory is impossible to prove are unconvincing, many conspiracy theorists say the same thing)
As for your opinion about how much of a conflict of interest or appearance thereof, if you trust NPR as a reliable source on this matter, then we can trust them also saying they have editorial independence (read: no bias)
your assertions of an expectation are similarly unconvincing, it's literally just you claiming as such, when others recognize that, like I can receive a dollar and not be controlled by the giver, so can NPR
It's not up to them, the 4% of their revenue that comes from federal funds comes to them through member station payments. They don't control the member stations or how they are funded.
Also, how could they be any more open about this? If you listen to any NPR member station you'll hear an acknowledgement of federal funds like once an hour.
I am not sure what you mean by them being open about it. Looks to me that they are open about the funding they get. Them getting grants to service communities that are not profitable doesn't mean that they take marching orders from Washington.
I feel like you're acting in bad faith conflating "public" and "state" in this instance. Wikipedia is an apt comparison that receives the vast majority of its funding through donations. It has received grants, but it's not "state run media" at all.
If the bar for being state affiliated is receiving money from the federal government, then I'm sure every news outlet and business of reasonable size qualifies (especially after the PPP loans).
Twitter probably shouldn't have gotten into labeling who is and isn't state funded, but if they are, US/UK/NATO orgs should be fair game alongside the Russians and Chinese.
NPR labeling the "state-funded media" claim as "false" when its trivially, factually true is a bad look for them as a fact-based organization.
NPR being state affiliated is false. NPR being funded by the state is not, but it leads people to believe that it's affiliated with the state, which is false.
It could be but it doesn't have to be. That's why editorial independence is a thing. And that's why you'll see broadcasters in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China try their level best not to criticize the ruling party and ruling individuals of the countries that they have their base in because if they did the consequences would likely be much further reaching than those related to funding.
The fact that this needs to be spelled out is a bit sad. One of the first things an editorial board of an actual news service does is to assert its independence, if it can't do that then they will resign in a very public way that leaves no doubt about what is going on.
For instance, the large number of people that resigned from Twitter when Musk took over (and that was besides the ones that he fired because he couldn't get them to do his bidding) made exactly such a statement.
I don’t regularly read the BBC or NPR. I have watched the BBC skirmish with government over their independence and it’s an active fight (see Gary Lineker fighter recently, interesting, on Twitter).
Do you see these fights for independence in Chinese and Russian news channels? And do you really think them similar to the BBC and NPR?
You will never, ever see a mainstream western news org demonize the US the way they do to Russia and China routinely.
Are they the exact same? No, but they're not so different when you zoom out. You don't need explicit censorship when you can manufacture consent at the hiring and promotion stages.
I have a lot of criticism for the US, but the US can at least punish its rulers at the ballot box. The US isn’t chucking journalists out the window or vanishing them on a regular basis. Objectively, it’s hard say the three are similar, as two of those countries deserve more criticism. They are not the same when you zoom out.
Exactly, I have been trying to explain it to people here (Québec/Canada)
Here people believe the CBC is an impartial view of reality, it’s through that filter they see all the events of the world.
Information that contradict their narrative become disinformation or conspiration.
Or you get labeled racist/transphobe/Trump supporter at the first doubt
Give me little hope for our country at the moment.
It's not that it's impartial or unbiased. It's that it's not an editorial arm for the state. The United States doesn't even have a centralized, consistent state-run party that would exercise consistent pressure on NPR to publish certain stories or frame them in a certain way. It's an absurd comparison to link these to Chinese or Russian state-affiliated media.
The burden on is on you to provide evidence for your claims, not for me to go fishing for them.
Regardless, I doubt whatever you have in mind is anything similar to an authoritarian regime that literally murders critical journalists and poisons opposition politicians. It is an absurd comparison.
State funded media is a phrase, it has meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words. Wikipedia's 'State media' page seems to have it covered:
> State media or government media are media outlets that are under financial and/or editorial control of the state or government, directly or indirectly.
[1]
Even that page makes a distinction between state funded and state media[2], but that is not how youtube[3] or others [4], [5], and I am sure many others[6 time based google] do not make the distinction. For better or worse 'State funded media' is often interchangeable with 'state media' and NPR is not state media even if some of its funds come from the state.
not OP, but I watch Al Jazeera a lot, they're more fair than NPR, they at least invite the "other party" to the talkshow, no matter how ridiculous they sound (e.g. russian people supporting the war). NPR hasn't done that in years, they do a literal strawman: they quote what a republican said (or they replay a short part from a speech) and then the all democratic leaning attendees talk about the subject. It's laughable. I wouldn't just blindly trust Al Jazeera either, I would double check whatever they say, but at least I can learn about the world from a different perspective: they cover a lot from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, which are places that Western Media usually ignores (unless it's something really big).
NPR is very high quality when it comes to art, science and other shows, but fails spectacularly when it's a political subject.
NPR has the opportunity to be a world class media group, like BBC and Al Jazeera, but they chose to waddle in mud together with the democratic party, estranging half of the US population - which could have been an easy win for them.
What you are saying is that NPR is left-wing, not "controlled by the government".
"controlled by the government" means: left-wing when the government is left-wing, right-wing when the government is right-wing. Was NPR right-wing when Trump was president?
If not, it is the proof that the label "government funded" is really really bad: it does not identify outlets that are biased by their funding, it just find an excuse to label as biased while not labeling as biased others than are as biased.
It does not mean NPR is not biased, but if you want to add a label to warn of a potential bias, you need to do it properly, and label ALL outlets that are similarly biased and identify properly the reason they are.
Funnily, NPR could also drop the 4% of revenue from government funding and continue to publish the same stories with exactly the same bias, and people who are arguing that NPR is biased should therefore argue then that NPR is not biased anymore.
I wasn't arguing that it's controlled by the government. It's somewhat controlled by the democratic party, which is 50% of the time in charge of the government.
I was mainly expanding on the fact that NPR chose to not represent 50% of the US population, and also miss having a chance of being a world class service, like the BBC or Al Jazeera.
I 100% agree that NPR is biased by left-wing ideology.
I don't really agree about "controlled by", that's like asking someone "who have you voted for" and after they said X, then saying "so you don't have any free will, you are just controlled by X". It's ridiculous: it's not because someone agrees with some party that the party controls them.
But being biased is not in itself a problem: every media is biased, only stupid people believe in neutrality. For example, giving 50-50 time to present each side's opinion is not unbiased: in a parallel universe where one side is, by chance, way bigger than the other (which is very easy to obtain as political trends are strongly based on charisma of few people), then, the 50-50 strategy leads to totally different coverage of the situation. The 50-50 strategy is not being neutral, it's being a sell-out that want to please everyone.
Another example is these situations where the journalist gives equal share to a person that says "it's currently raining" and a person that says "it's currently sunny" (and, please, avoid "it can be raining and sunny at the same time", obviously, my example corresponds to a situation where it is not the case).
At the end of the day, it's not a problem: you have left-wing media, you have right-wing media, as long as they are not lying and that you don't have a society too stupid to live in an echo chamber, then, citizen are given all the information they need to make their own opinion. And if they are living in their echo chamber, the problem is not the existence of biased media, but a society problem.
But in this discussion, the problem is that the label is not "this company is ideologically biased", but "this company is controlled by the government". You cannot blame me for talking about the subject in question. The question of NPR being left-wing is irrelevant, but pushing this in the discussion is in fact even a problem: like if intellectually dishonest labeling are ok because NPR is left-wing.
Trustworthy when it is about non-local affairs, hopelessly biased when it is about local affairs. But Al Jazeera doesn't really pretend to be unbiased. Sometimes I'm positively surprised by the quality of their reporting. But them being Qatar based the amount of local news that would affect me is nil. They definitely offer an interesting perspective on the world as seen from the Arabic perspective, meanwhile I'm well aware of the fact that their English language news isn't always a 1:1 with their coverage of the same subject in languages that I can not read unaided.
Sorry, but aljazeera is on the level of RT. That you think otherwise just shows that you are more willing to ignore a biais when it is in your favor.
It has always been known in the arabic world that AJ is a complete puppet of the Qatari royal family (and even staffed by members of the royal family) and it can't be a coincidence that AJ's coverage is almost always a mirror image of qatari foreign policy talking points/positions. It is the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya, just with more international presence.
The point is that Al Jazeera exhibits a lot of bias on international issues that are relevant to the Qataris, not just local news. This includes US foreign policy, environmental things, and global economic policy. They are basically RT (think about how RT covered george floyd), but generally allied with the west.
Since when did Tesla start producing media? Specifically, media funded by the government? Can you provide proof of this funding and links to what they produced?
This comment is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people who can't help but try to find reasons to dislike Elon, because NPR told them to do so.
There's a bunch of state funded media in Europe, for example Scandinavian, German, UK, etc public service media orgs. They have standards for editorial independence and I think they are just as independent or more, as NPR.
That excerpt isn't about their funding. The CPB funds (in part) public radio stations.
Many of those public radio stations purchase NPR-produced content. (And from other similar providers like American Public Media (Marketplace), PRX (This American Life), etc.)
NPR's customers can't afford NPR's offerings without said Federal funding, which is why NPR's particularly interested in it.
That funding page says 31% of NPR's revenue comes from programming fees from member stations. Some of the 8% "other revenues" and 5% "PRSS contract" sound like they may come from member stations too, so let's call it 40% total from member stations as a best guess.
Member stations themselves receive 13% of their revenue from the CPB (8%) and "federal, state, and local governments" (5%). Let's call that piece about 10% as a best guess of the federal-only part.
40% from member stations, which themselves get 10% from the Feds, is 4% additional from the Feds, bringing up NPR's federal revenue from the 1% they said to an all-in total of 5%.
It seems that NPR's statement is a bit misleading, but not that materially so.
(I'm as surprised as many of you may be, readers -- I thought they were much more federally funded as well.)
My accounting skills are less than amateur, so please point out anything I may have missed. I'm not quite sure if 40% of 10% computation is a sound representation of what's going on.
Those member stations choose to spend that money on NPR content. They are under no obligation (aside from standing contracts) to continue to give that money to NPR in the future. They could opt to license programming from other sources.
That's like saying a federal employee who chooses to donate some of their income to NPR is giving them government funding.
I agree to some extent, but when the federal government is funding similar organizations with a similar mission, they have a strong incentive to work together. Public radio stations are operated and listened to by the kind of people who like NPR programming.
It's more like a federal employee who works for NPR and believes in NPR's mission donating to NPR. Yes, it's not compulsory, but the money is flowing towards entities with closely related missions that have a strong incentive to cooperate.
But again, I agree with you that the voluntary nature of the cooperation makes it quite different from merely some kind of shell game.
As the article indicates, those stations receive an average of 8% from CPB, and 5% from Federal/state/local government. The other 87% comes from elsewhere - 43% of it as individual donations.
Yes, probably. Not only does Walmart receive significant wage and benefit subsidies for its employees, but they also receive income from customers using food stamps. In 2014 that food stamp spending was estimated to be $13 billion, far more than they pay in taxes.
I'm suggest Walmart similarly benefits from indirect Federal funding of their business, in the form of wages/benefits they don't have to give out to their employees receiving public assistance to be able to live.
You could chuck most of Musk's portfolio into that category TBH. What ever company does that dumb tunnel idea and Tesla are the two additional companies that come to mind.
That would make probably almost all businesses in the US federally funded, as the US government is the single largest employer of people, and those people spend their money at private businesses. The US government purchases things from private businesses.
39% of NPR revenue comes directly from corporations.
Another 12% comes from foundations (the wealthy donor class).
Only 31% of their revenue comes from member stations and only 13% of that comes from CPB or government sources, which totals up to 4% coming from the government.
So corporate interests fund NPR more than 10x times as much as the government.
Federal funding isn't critical to NPR, but it's important to the public radio ecosystem of small local stations, who get ~13% of their funding from government.
So evidently NPR disagrees with the "it's just a small percentage, who cares" judgement (until that judgment being on their website becomes embarrassing)
"We don't want our customers being unable to afford our products" is, I suspect, a common opinion among businesses. I'm not sure why you'd find it surprising.
Walmart wants people to spend their food stamps on their groceries. Tesla wants people to use the EV tax credits on their cars. They don't get accused of being government controlled because of it.
>On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.
It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.
They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence.
This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.
That could apply to a huge portion of all businesses on Twitter. How many of the F500 have benefitted from a gov't bailout or some other taxpayer subsidy. No one is really squeaky clean on this front.
This is an excellent point. If you review my comment history I think you’ll find some of my most downvoted comments being about how rolling out the biggest infringements upon civil liberties since WWII, and then creating a financing program that media companies rely upon to survive, was one of the most corrupt things I’d seen during my life time.
To call NPR state-affiliated media to abuse the term to the point of incoherence. You may as well, by your own logic, say every media company ultimately has at least one dollar that's passed through the government and is thus state-affiliated. Thus they all deserve the label. Thus the label is meaningless, which incidentally, appears to be the point of this authoritarian-apolgistic nonsense.
It's continued abuse of language in the hopes of making it impossible for people to determine what's true -- in the hopes of making people give up even caring about facts.
I like how, nowhere in that entire two paragraphs were you able to explain why it's not state-affiliated when its funded by the government. All you did was try to shove the label off because other media is possibly also funded the same way.
I’ve left a number of comments on this thread arguing why this is not a reasonable comparison and so have other people. And you specifically were bringing up the topic of funding, so I was avoiding going off the rails too much.
If I have understood you correctly you were concerned by funding being cut off. Why would that not be a concern with other media, not receiving any government funds, as well? I also do not really understand why you are more concerned with government dependencies than with any other dependencies. Actually I think the latter dependencies might be the stronger influence on a media company, especially if it is a large part of the budget.
not necessarily. It just means it's not as bad as it would be in China or Russia.
NPR knew the democrats would be back in power in a couple of years...they weren't risking much by being anti-Trump. But they did gain goodwill from the democrats, which can extend them support every time they are in power.
I am not arguing for or against either side, I am just pointing out a flaw in your logic.
I think NPR is so solidly on the democrats side, that it's hard to distinguish what came first: the chicken or the egg?
Elon's playing word games. When the average person talks about State Affiliated Media they're referring to editorial control. As far as I know NPR has always had editorial control and goes to great lengths to maintain neutrality in their writing. They've certainly screwed up in major ways before, but compared to MSNBC, Fox, the NYT, NYP, and CNN I'd say NPR looks like a saint.
The irony I see here is that Twitter is on record as to being involved in suppression exercises around COVID, where they basically acted as the governments hands to suppress legitimate voices. Given that, Twitter needs to wear its own State Affiliated Media badge. Hell, what do you even call an entity that willfully suppresses valid and good information that is not favorable to the government? A state apologist?
I was going to mention Radio Free Europe as a really good example of egregious, western state-sponsored media, but then on a lark, I looked up how well regarded they are, bias-wise, and now I don't know what to think.
Turns out many democratic systems actually like politically neutral media that inform the public in the way they need to be informed in order to function in a democratic system. Healthy democratic governments abhor propaganda.
Don’t worry about the watchdogs. Just read the content. It’s true that RFE/RL focuses on human rights and democracy, and authoritarian countries don’t look very good in those categories. But the reporting is factual, and their reporters run great risks. Several are in jail in Belarus, Russia, etc.
That was kind of my read on it, which is what sent me into a tailspin. I ended up questioning all the tools I had to evaluate a source without taking it on as another job.
But it turns out that the difference in bias of RFE and any number of out-and-out propaganda mills is that if a story is inconvenient to RFE's agenda, they'll de-emphasize it. On the other hand, an out-and-out propaganda mill will just make shit up to fit their narrative.
So where I landed was that RFE was ultimately reliable, but subject to the same little human biases as NPR or AP News or the Financial Times, or any number of other sources that I do trust. Their main source of bias is a bit more of an elephant in the room, but if anything, it makes them a bit harder on their masters.
Don’t worry about the watchdogs. You can just read the content to see. It’s true they’re interested in human rights news, and authoritarian countries don’t look good on that subject. But the content is factual, and their reporters work at great risk.
Hey, just want to say thanks for saying that you changed your mind. It's hard to do on public forums and just in general. It's even harder to say that you don;t know something. Thanks for saying this.
I think they were trying to say because Twitter successfully suppressed conspiracy theories in the past that it gives them a pass when the information happened to not be a conspiracy theory. If that was the takeaway, I fully disagree. If you get into the suppression game, even for the right reasons, you deserve whatever comes your way when you're wrong even once. That's how we keep powerful entities honest.
covid misinformation is a conspiracy theory, suppressing idiocy is virtuous
"oh but if you allow a platform to suppress stupid shit then how do you know that they won't suppress other blah blah blah" judgment my bro, it is ok if things are subjective
I'm not criticizing them for suppressing conspiracy theories, or even idiocy, I'm criticizing them for getting it wrong. Sure, it's fine if things are subjective, but it's also fine when hell rains down on you for being so seriously wrong.
The kind of flamewar comments you posted to this thread will get an account banned on HN, so please don't do that. We want thoughtful, respectful, and above all curious conversation here.
Edit: I took a look at your recent account history and saw two relevant things: (1) a lot of good comments, and (2) no other cases of flamewar. Thank you! That's great, and should make the current issue easy to avoid in the future.
I've been personally blocked on multiple forums for saying that we don't have enough information to say that there wasn't a lab leak.
I'm not making a leak claim, but stating as an expert that it's malpractice to characterize your assumptions as facts and without a long and detailed audit we could not know what we'd need to know to make a factual statement. No audit of the Wuhan lab had been done so we could not know what happened.
The government pressured old-Twitter to ban people who pointed out this fact.
> suppressing idiocy is virtuous
Are you applying to have your account blocked then? Because what I'm saying is tautological.
> judgment my bro, it is ok if things are subjective
For your opinion, sure. For policy, no. If we can't attempt to objectively show that something is wrong we can't claim to be censoring misinformation.
it's a good thing that everyone who holds any amount of power is always purely, perfectly virtuous and altruistic in their judgement—if this wasn't the case, that sure would complicate things, wouldn't it?
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. We ban accounts that cross this line (for more explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), so please stop doing this.
yeah that is definitely a requisite assumption of my position
for the same reason we don't allow governments to enact laws or provide any kind of justice system, because there is no way to guarantee they will be always perfectly correct
At least as of the time of this comment, no special label was applied to Stars and Stripes (50% funded by the US Department of Defense), Al Hurra (100% funded by the US Agency for Global Media), or CBC (>50% funded by the Canadian government).
Maybe that's just a mistake, and every news organization that gets a dollar of funding from any government will eventually get its own "Government-funded Media" label. Or maybe Twitter's new owner is being a petty little despot and didn't like a recent NPR story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It would be helpful to add some numbers to your comment. 31% of NPR revenues are from member stations, and 13% of that 31% is federal funding. So ~4% of NPR revenue is indirect federal funds. This is, to give one example, substantially less than the portion of grocery store revenues that come from SNAP. Do we consider all grocery chains to be government sponsored businesses? Is Y Combinator government sponsored, since so many of its investments received money from the SVB bailout?
My answer would be yes, government support is essential for most businesses, but that makes this label useless in theory and malicious in practice when only applied to a tiny subset of government-funded companies.
Your quoting was rather disingenuous. How could you not quote the last line (regarding how much of their budget comes from this source), when you quoted almost all the rest regarding federal funding?
I love that people are trying to coat his actions in reason like "look at the numbers, it's not spite it's truth" and then Elon tweets "Defund @NPR" and makes them look silly.
And this proves they're not government funded / affiliated how?
Didn't they tweet that their funding by the government was so minuscule that they shouldn't be labeled state-affiliated? You cannot simultaneously say that while also declaring you can't exist to your full capacity without government funding.
You might compare with a government contractor like SpaceX. Private organizations can depend on government funding without being fully government-controlled. Speaking of SpaceX as a privately owned company is still accurate. Calling it state-affiliated wouldn’t be entirely wrong (they work with NASA), but a bit weird.
In NPR’s case, their customers (public radio stations) receive a lot of government funding, so it’s one step removed compared to a government contractor.
NPR is a nonprofit with a board of directors that includes NPR member station managers, though. Control over NPR seems rather diffuse? Nonprofit boards are often kind of weird that way.
Why are you bring up non-media companies? That label was specifically for media. You know, the ones that are supposed to bring you neutral information.... which is why the label makes more sense for media companies.
Good. It's clear now that Twitter is just an information control mechanism for Musk, and journalists should quit their addiction to it. I think every major news outlet should have their own ActivityPub compatible service, essentially as a modern replacement for RSS.
> Twitter is just an information control mechanism for Musk, and journalists should quit
agreed. That was the case long before Musk.
Would you have felt comfortable articulating that opinion, two years ago? When anything but Twitter was "an extremist echo chamber"? When the only censorship they were indulging in was the censorship we still can't talk about?
>Would you have felt comfortable articulating that opinion, two years ago?
I posted rather often about how awful Twitter was long before there was a whiff of Musk buying it. (It's still awful.) I didn't really talk about "information control", but I don't care about that now, either; Twitter's audience was never that big.
Twitter was also an extremist echo chamber. It's how the January 6th insurrection happened, a violent attack on the US Capitol that was organized, launched, and coordinated in real-time on Twitter. You can't do that if voices of sanity are seeping in. It's just that Twitter as many echo chambers, some bigger and more dangerous than others.
They're right, though. Somewhere between the "Matt Tabbi truther" and "Dorsey supremacist" mindset, we can all acknowledge that Twitter is not an unbiased news source. It's a bunch of people competing for attention in a sinkhole that rewards the worst contributors most consistently. Even as a liberal progressive, the caliber of extremist 140 character takes Twitter has promoted drives me crazy. It precludes meaningful discussion and forces interactions into the outskirts, which (as the parent is joking about) ironically happens less on federated platforms.
Twitter very regularly censored people on the left (the real left, not neo-liberals). Just ask any Bernie Sanders fan how "fair" Twitter was prior to Musk.
Musk is just as bad though, just with his simp army and the alt-right.
with ActivityPub you can have specific actors like @breaking@npr.org, @sports@npr.org, @finance@npr.org, @waitwaitdonttellme@npr.org, @reporter@npr.org, et cetera.
it was annoying to me to type it too! There are also webfinger URLs that serve the same purpose like https://mastodon.social/@gargron == @gargron@mastodon.social
That's not a WebFinger URL. WebFinger URLs point to /.well-known/ path that returns a JSON document with links to other places for the user. To simplify WebFinger use by a human, we introduced acct:user@example.com syntax. And (at least my) WebFinger clients can assume the acct: part, much like email clients do for the email: scheme.
It's on Mastodon though, the automatic linking wouldn't add mailto: at the front, think it's worth the cost of a few people not being able to post their email address without a mailto:
Referencing one of these username handles in external CMS systems (news sites, blogs, etc) might automatically convert them in Rich Text editors, or just Word processors, or even operating system toolings. Seems worth not re-using the same URI format.
Email remains undefeated as the original, indestructible, federated social network. It's a shame about the flub with Google Buzz, that could've been the basis for something great.
Strange that labelling medias with their true funding diminishes their credibility so much that they’d flee to any place where this information is not disclosed.
I suspect this is a bad-faith argument, but just to be clear, NPR get's a tiny fraction of its funding from the government *and* maintains editorial independence.
> The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Being free of direct government funding does not make it free from editorial independence. You can listen and get an idea of their underwriting. They're clear to walk the line around a lot of topics to not upset their corporate and non profit overlords. We live in a corporatocracy and these companies and non profits are revolving doors for regulatory capture through lobbying and other methods.
A significant percentage of NPR member station funding is from individual donations, NPR is obviously also very conscious about producing the type of content its audience expects. No media outlet on planet earth is free from the influence of its audience.
If you really want to delve into how, where, and whom makes the news I suggest start by looking at the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters:
The problem isn’t that Twitter is labeling media with true funding. If it was, you’d be seeing under MSNBC or CNN or Fox News who their main sponsors are (which are probably bigger than NPR’s government contribution).
So by cherry picking only some funding sources to label with, that means that you are trying to present a narrative.
(or if Twitter is not trying to present a narrative, instead it means that they‘re just being naive)
As long as Twitter lists itself as a Qatari/Saudi backed social media company I suppose fair is fair and at least they are being consistent in how they apply the rules. I wonder if they will do so.
Yeah I'm sure it has nothing to do with months of the CEO putting out right wing agitprop and promoting QAnon conspiracies. He openly promoted GOP candidates on his media site.
A) I never said Twitter should be labelled a state-owned news company, just whether it should be labelled state-owned.
B) Twitter (like all "platforms") holds the ability to control the flow of information. The moment a "platform" puts their finger on the scales and blocks certain types of legal information from being discovered (as they did last week in blocking substack links, for example) then they forfeit their claim to being a "platform" and should be treated as media distribution companies. As such they should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as news organizations should be
> Twitter doesn’t report the news. It’s a platform. Labels are for publishers of news.
“A platform” is just an internet term for a kind of publisher (roughly corresponding to “an online publisher who mostly publishes things for which it is – or would be, if it was operating in the US – protected from the liability usually attached to publishers via DMCA section 230.”)
Personally yes, when i hear everyone clamour for transparency, I want brutal honest transparency, so yes twitter handle and twitter docs should clearly mention that they are owned by Saudia and terrorist Qatar.
Same with DW News, Al Jazeera, Middle East eye and Gulf news.
I've always wondered, without pure transparency, who will guard the guards?
At least DW is totally transparent about it. A quick look at their web site gives you that info immediately. The info page about it even figures as one of the top Questions in their FAQ:
"DW is Germany’s international broadcaster. It is organized under public law and funded by the German federal tax budget."
"DW is financed via funding from the state, i.e. from tax revenue. This is in contrast to the domestic public channels, which are funded via broadcasting fees."
Al-jazeera is one of the most renowned news agencies in the world, finally giving an honest voice to the Arab and Islamic world,
and they can do this because they don't rely on pleasing advertisers.
What do you mean by anti-sentitic?
Jesus have you seen Al Jazeera covering how Qatar has been known to be a permissive environment for terror financing, reportedly funding U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Al qaeda and ISIS, as well as several extremist groups operating in Syria. At least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to the mastermind of the 9/11. Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, also made Doha his headquarters for years while the Qatari's--with the Qatari's Government support and even the Muslim Brotherhood has received significant support from Qatar. Of course, not all of this is supported by the government in Doha. Many individuals and charities in Qatar have been known to raise large sums of money for al-Qaeda, the Nusra front, Hamas, and even ISIS. (
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115hhrg26427/html/C... html). Be use I haven't?
Also what about their hard hitting on average of Qatargate and human rights abuses including killings of their LGBTQ dissidents?
Qatar is a state sponsor of terrorism and Al Jazeera is a terrorist network.
According to official US Committee on Foreign Affairs, has been known to be a permissive environment for terror financing, reportedly funding U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Al qaeda and ISIS, as well as several extremist groups operating in Syria. At least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to the mastermind of the 9/11. Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, also made Doha his headquarters for years while the Qatari's--with the Qatari's Government support and even the Muslim Brotherhood has received significant support from Qatar. Of course, not all of this is supported by the government in Doha. Many individuals and charities in Qatar have been known to raise large sums of money for al-Qaeda, the Nusra front, Hamas, and even ISIS.(https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115hhrg26427/html/C...)
Let me know when Al Jazeera and Middle East eye cover any of the human rights abuses and funding for Hamas or even the brutal repression of LGBTQ in Qatar.
Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla are not newspapers/publishers. The reason for labelling news organisations' government affiliations is for the viewer/reader to understand that there may or may not be bias, and where the funding is coming from.
If NPR's government contributions are embarrassing for the organisation, it might be best for them to forgo that funding. Additionally, if there's no influence/bias, then why does it matter that their funding is disclosed to the reader?
Because the label has a connotation that is not accurate.
Connotation is just as important as denotation when evaluating meaning and accuracy of statements. Engineers love to pretend otherwise - that's probably part of why we're engineers - but that doesn't make them right.
A connotation is subjective and should not matter. Public funding however is. In my country there are more or less trustworthy government funded news stations that are also flagged. At least on youtube.
But I believe the label is more important than what some people fear other people would maybe perceive.
It would simply be a connotation if Twitter's own documentation on what that tag means didn't explicitly state that the tag means that the source's editorial process may be influenced by the government organizations funding them. That's not the case for any of the current organizations that have gotten that tag.
The connotation is a product of how the label was inconsistently applied in the past. Consistent application of the label will solve this problem pretty soon, without requiring Twitter to make judgment calls that should be beyond its purview
Fair enough, but without doing linguistic gymnastics, "State-affiliated" should also be seen by any reasonably educated adult to indicate "State-edited". "State-funded" is an appropriate tag! I'd recommend this, actually.
NPR show Frontline is a great place to start this education.
Attempting to place NPR and that kind of sentiment in the same conversation as anything other than a great example of how Gov't funds can be provided without such _control_ is disingenuous at best.
Virtually no media companies admit to being state edited, even if they are literally a department of the government. Heck it's common even for government agencies to claim they are independent of "the government" despite being a part of it. So if that were the bar, there'd be no such labelling at all.
They are playing fast and loose with their accounting by ignoring the large contribution that comes from local affiliate stations, local affiliate stations that receive a large part of their funding from the corporation for public broadcasting, a government sponsored entity.
In reality government funding accounts for much more than 1% of NPR's budget.
it seems its not. they say 30% of NPRs funding come from local affiliates paying for NPR programming. And on average those local NPRs get 8% of their funding from government. Do the math, that means 2.4% + 1% of NPR comes directly government
"And on average those local NPRs get 8% of their funding from government."
NPR itself [1] says that figure is 13 percent, counting state governments. In either case, I am comfortable that NPR is editorially independent but also comfortable saying that without government money, it's a podcast network.
The power of the purse is the power to pull strings even if that power is not currently being used, and even if the marionette would scream really loudly if the strings were pulled. I don't think "state-affiliated" was a fair label. "Government-funded" was, and NPR is damaging its credibility more than Twitter could by pitching a fit over it.
but as v0idzer0 pointed out in a reply to your similar comment above
"it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best"
"closely associated with another typically in a dependent or subordinate position"
"an organization that is officially connected with or controlled by another, usually larger, organization"
dependent: "relying on another for support" (also uses of the words "need" and "requires")
I would agree with parent comment - NPR is not directly, closely affiliated with the state. And isn't in a subordinate position with the state. It has about 12% of its funding from tax dollars, but I think it'd likely exists without that.
I also agree with parent comment they are state funded, however, and anyone who had 12% of their income from a given source for free and no work would be biased and influenced to be friendly towards them. To suggest that the people who work at and run NPR are free from bias and influence is demonstrably not true, and so it also follows we can't assume they would approach their funding without bias.
Is it? "State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution."
Yeah but it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best
Twitter:
“Financial Resource”
Considering we do have a law around funding NPR and the company would be impacted of that funding went away, personally I see it as appropriate.
However, I also see it appropriate that Fox News and Washington Post get the same tag. (party political pressures)
I was responding to the "As per Twitter’s criteria, it’s money." part. Fox and WP as state-affiliated seems weird to me: being close to a party line is not necessarily the same as state-affiliation. (Given we're talking a democracy and not a one-party state - I don't think you could make that distinction in e.g. China due to how interconnected it is there)
Parties absolutely have access to these outlets.
We all have to be blind to think that if Biden request WP to write something positive, they wouldn’t? Same with Fox and Trump.
Does the govt use influence to persuade news outlets? Of course they do. Any major news outlet that says they are 100% independent and doesn’t have some percentage of outside influence is outright lying.
Does the Whitehouse (in general) use press access passes as bartering chip, yes of course!
With that said, “state-affiliated” depends on criteria. Whether it’s agreed upon or not, Twitter set their criteria. Other outlets set their criteria as well…on news, politics, health, and illicit.
NPR was, quite-literally created by an act of the United States congress.
It receives DIRECT funding from the United States government.
Twitter was generous in changing the label from "State-affiliated" media (given that it was literally created by the US Government) to "Government-funded media".
There is no possible argument against the "Government-funded media" label that makes sense. They're government funded. NPR's parent company, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is also government funded. Neither of these funding points are debatable (aka Full stop).
Corporations and institutions/foundations make up more than half of NPR's funding. And that exceeds the pledge drive funding, which collectively vastly exceeds the government funds they receive.
When NPR runs their "ADM Supermarket to the World" spots, that is telling you who is really funding them and who to worry about exerting editorial control.
And then lets run the same statistics for administrations from the other side. After all, state-controlled media would have to follow switching government lines on this, so it'll show Republicans loving NPR and Democrats hating it during the previous administration, correct?
I'm not making a claim on political affiliation (and don't have a detailed opinion on it, being not from the US I don't read NPR stuff very much and have never heard any of their radio programmes). It's not necessary for my argument. (People desperately trying to turn everything they dislike into government-led propaganda is sadly an international pattern)
>I don't read NPR stuff very much and have never heard any of their radio programmes).
Then you should do so. Especially Fresh Air, Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!, Car Talk (although, sadly that's just an archive -- no new shows), Story Corps[0] and a whole bunch of others that have exactly zero to do with anything political.
I wanted to add Forum as well, but since it's from KQED[1] I'm sure some folks around here will call it the propaganda arm of the People's Republic of California. <eye-roll>.
And Marketplace, On Point, RadioLab, Science Friday and a bunch of others from WBUR[2]. And WNYC[3] and WAMU[4] also have a number of shows that never even mention the dysfunction in the US political system.
That said, there are many NPR (and member station) shows that actually report the news of the day and cover political topics -- regardless of party or point of view.
Okay, it's definitely not Breitbart, Zerohedge or Alex Jones, but it's certainly not a communist organization. Rather, it's center-right, just like most of the US.
Regardless, there's lots of interesting and fun stuff, especially Fresh Air. I remember being heartbroken fifteen years ago or so to find out that Terry Gross[5] was not only past childbearing age, but gay as well. Because she's so amazing, I often fantasized about having kids with her. Seriously.
A very recent episode featured a comedic rant about Gov. DeSantis. It called the Parental Rights Bill "Don't Say Gay" and joked about how he was attacking the Disney characters. Naturally all good NPR listeners would laugh about that.
Fresh Air: How many guests has she had on who might also appear on FoxNews? Versus MSNBC, CNN, NYT, or WaPo.
I'll tell you why they do that: if they presented a non-querulous story about the Hunter Biden laptop, their contributors would angrily demand to know why they're presenting "Fox News talking points."
>A very recent episode featured a comedic rant about Gov. DeSantis. It called the Parental Rights Bill "Don't Say Gay" and joked about how he was attacking the Disney characters. Naturally all good NPR listeners would laugh about that.
Yup. And I bet it was hilarious! They send up everyone. No particular political affiliation required. It's a comedy "game" show.
And when they skewered Obama and Clinton and Kerry and Biden and Harris and Pritzker (WWDTM is based in Chicago) and countless other people you disagree with as well as many, many you do agree with including Ron deSantis[0].
>Fresh Air: How many guests has she had on who might also appear on FoxNews? Versus MSNBC, CNN, NYT, or WaPo.
Well, since Fresh Air is almost all interviews with novelists, musicians, actors and other interesting cultural stuff, I suppose that most of the folks who Watch Fox News, if they like fiction, music, movies and theater would love to hear interviews with those folks.
And those who are interviewed on Fresh Air are usually flogging their new book/album/movie/art installation/whatever, so I'd imagine most of them would appear on any media outlet that would have them.
>if they presented a non-querulous story about the Hunter Biden laptop,
You've clearly never listened to Fresh Air, because the wouldn't do a Hunter Biden laptop story, or a Jared Kushner (yes, I love the UAE's money more than I love Ivanka, and I love Ivanka a lot!) story either.
Because it's not a political show, it's a show about culture (music, fiction, movies, etc.) and the creative people who generate it.
As I pointed out, not everything is about a bunch of gasbags bloviating about how terrible the other guy is. That shit is really tired. And has been for quite some time.
Are you an American? If so, you're my fellow citizen and potential collaborator in helping to solve the myriad issues we have here. Not my adversary or my enemy. But a fellow human and potential friend -- even if (and I have no idea one way another) we don't share the same political beliefs.
the truth is that just about all Americans agree on many, many more things than they disagree.
I find it reductive and insulting to have to justify liking non-political stuff to folks who insist that everything they don't like (and that goes for all those afflicted with Hunter Thompson's disease[1], not any particular viewpoint, whether I agree with their policy ideas or not):
But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his
exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by
tinhorn politicians.
The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor
devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment
on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as
to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be
said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease.
It's divisive, unpleasant and really, really tired. Please stop.
>Well, since Fresh Air is almost all interviews with novelists, musicians, actors and other interesting cultural stuff, I suppose that most of the folks who Watch Fox News, if they like fiction, music, movies and theater would love to hear interviews with those folks.
> And those who are interviewed on Fresh Air are usually flogging their new book/album/movie/art installation/whatever, so I'd imagine most of them would appear on any media outlet that would have them.
So I guess your answer is "none" then?
> You've clearly never listened to Fresh Air, because the wouldn't do a Hunter Biden laptop story, or a Jared Kushner (yes, I love the UAE's money more than I love Ivanka, and I love Ivanka a lot!) story either.
"They" is NPR here, not Fresh Air (which I do listen to). NPR News or All Things Considered is "they." Show me where that laptop story was covered anywhere on NPR or PBS.
I hosted a guy at Google, Hugh Sinclair, who talks about the reality of microfinance, having spend 10 years in the field doing it. He was turned down for Fresh Air.
> As I pointed out, not everything is about a bunch of gasbags bloviating about how terrible the other guy is. That shit is really tired. And has been for quite some time.
Everything on NPR is, unfortunately, unless it's about the arts. And even there, it's heavily over-weighted to "arts by under-represented people."
> when they skewered Obama and Clinton and Kerry and Biden and Harris and Pritzker
when was that, exactly?
> most of the folks who Watch Fox News
Oh, the condescension there.
> it's divisive, unpleasant and really, really tired. Please stop.
Fortunately, if you only listen to NPR, you'll never have to hear it.
Yikes - I didn't see this earlier but this is the kind of thing we ban accounts for, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please don't do this again.
To get that out of the way, you can follow the smart process proposed by the person you answer to:
If indeed the organization is biased because government funded, it means that they will never publish stories that the government is not happy with.
So, under Biden, they will not publish stories that Democrats don't like, and under Trump, they will not publish stories that Republicans don't like.
If it is not the case, then they are not biased because government funded. They may be politically biased for other reason, but it does not matter if they are government funded or not, and it is stupid to give them a label "government funded" to warn about bias if "government funded" has nothing to do with this bias. Especially because it means that non-government-funded organization can be as biased but not have any label.
Your arguments seem to hinge on some hypothetical world where Republicans are in charge AND the executive agencies are all on board with their agenda. Then, to be "government funded" NPR would have to hew to the Republican line. Q.E.D.
Maybe the first part of that will happen someday. It hasn't yet. In fact, large parts of the civil service are permanently one party and do not change when the other party takes charge (as, indeed, the Civil Service reforms of the 19th Century set out to insure). Only about 4,000 jobs are politically appointed, according to Wikipedia.
If the executive agencies are imposing their agenda rather than the "government agenda", then, they are not biased for being "government funded", they are being biased for being "funded". If the government has no power, they could be "government funded", or "privately funded", or whatever, they are not manipulated by the government, they are manipulated by a lobby.
What you are saying is that there is a group of interest that are independent of the government, and that has an influence because they are giving money.
Why should we had a label when this group of interest is "the executive agencies", but not when it is "the investors of Wall Street", the "mass media conservative groups", the "christian lobby", ...?
(I don't pretend it's the case. I think people who really believe that the evil executive agencies impose their agenda are idiot who are not able to mentally comprehend that maybe NPR news are biased because their redaction is politically biased, with or without the existence of executive agencies)
(also, the reasoning on 4'000 jobs politically appointed is very weak: while there are way more than 4'000 jobs in the executive agencies, the very very very majority of these jobs have ZERO decision power, and the position of power in these agencies are the one politically appointed. If these executive agencies are sending memos to bias the media, or even renegotiating the contracts or the refunding based on what the media have published, it is with the support of the politically appointed board of directors)
I'm not even the person you asked. What exactly is your goal? Get a random person on the internet to disagree with you about something that's not even on topic for the discussion at hand?
You’ve supported my point: there’s no consistent forced state narrative. Bias for or against a political party is orthogonal to whether the state itself is executing editorial control.
The Twitter Files show government agencies directly pressuring Twitter to cover or suppress stories. They did this despite a Republican president being in power.
So yes, that is "the state itself [is] executing editorial control." You are just spinning words if you say, "ok, yeah, they do it, but it's not consistent."
How is "I'd not seen that part, details please" a delaying tactic? You'd really help your argument if you, you know, supported it instead of trying to divert with questions. Sorry that I don't take "The twitter files prove that the government controls NPR" at face value.
That's really the best you can do? One story that amplifies NPR's dislike of Saudi Arabia ("Yemen" is hardly the centerpiece of Biden foreign policy),
and another claiming there's dislike of the Democratic primary calendar?
Because the NPR receives almost no money from the federal government. Read the article. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Although NPR receives less than 1% of its direct funding from the federal government, member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from state governments, and also the US government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1/3 isn't 100%, but it's also far from insignificant.
Hold on, 1/3 of what? What funding paid the dues back to CPB?
My local affiliate breaks their funding down as 50% member support, 40% corporate/charitable underwriting, 10% state/local govt funding. Maybe other NPR affiliates also get federal grants, but this one doesn’t.
Seems like we’re back to a pretty small fraction of funding for the US State to exert hard control over the content produced.
> 1/3 isn’t 100%, but it’s also far from insignificant.
It gets 1/3 from member stations, which get “far more” than 1% from various levels of government.
“Far more than 1%” of 1/3 does not mean “1/3”. It’s actually, IIRC, about another 4% of NPRs funding that indirectly comes from government this way, bringing NPR to about 5% government funding, including indirect government funding through its members stations.
They are not categorized as a publisher. They receive legal protections as such. This will quickly evolve into a section 230 debate.
I do agree social media companies should be categorized as a publisher - or content providers, but they are not. I think changing section 230 would solve a lot of problems by removing very specific legal protections, which news companies do not receive, and help prevent clear issues such as knowingly promoting false information.
There are those that disagree with me. Problems exist with any solution such as who should judge what should not be allowed and would the counter devolve into an organization that could control information dissemination? A valid point. I think the answer is already out there - a very low standard (or to say another way the high burden of proof required) current news organizations are held to by law, which most seem not to debate is too restrictive, or some line between nothing and that.
There is a lot of academic discourse on this topic and I recommend researching 230 more. It’s a fascinating policy debate with pros and cons on both sides. It was written in 1996, the year the palm pilot and the Pentium 166MHz processor was introduced.
> If NPR's government contributions are embarrassing for the organisation, it might be best for them to forgo that funding.
Ah, yes, the old "if I misrepresent the issue and assign a negative emotion to it, other people will see it as bad" trope. That's fun.
Do you have any evidence they find the contributions "embarrassing" as opposed to finding the label an intentionally-misleading dog whistle? Or is that not something that occurred to you?
I don’t think this really answers the greater point that the commenter made though. Without the public funding, they wouldn’t have the label—-whether they deem it embarrassing or opposed to its perceived meaning.
Elon publishes commentary and opinions about policy and society to his Twitter account regularly. He probably has a much broader reach than NPR. To say he shouldn't be held to the same standards because he's not a "publisher" is laughable.
Making NPR display its funding sources for all to see is a good thing (although "state-affiliated" was not the right label). Not making other high profile accounts do the same is pure hypocrisy.
How much more “state affiliated” can you get than when Trump was in office he spent most of his day watching FoxNews and called it when he didn’t like the coverage and they acquiesced?
This is not some conspiracy theory. It was very much out in the open.
Even more recently, the house speaker gave Fox preferred access to the Jan 6th video.
I don’t even doubt you, I just don’t think it’s the same thing as consistently-affiliated state media. If anything it’s party biased, but it’s not because they’re afraid the party will jail them, kill them, or forcibly take over their business.
This is true, but Elon Musk is, let's say, a producer of content that drives engagement on the platform that is Twitter. I'd say he gets enough tax breaks and such to qualify for a state shill label. That's not even considering his many years' long business affiliation with the Saudis, even before he decided to piss away 44 billion dollars to buy one of the world's largest megaphones.
Twitter is a media company, a publisher with an editorial voice that we have to assume is independent from the Saudi government or any government funding the owner's other businesses.
more ontopic, I think its indicative of a general exodus of brands in general as well. nobody wants to pay for the checkmark, nobody wants to have their brand identity or message challenged or negated by fly-by-night impostors, and most people have lost tolerance for the abdication of moderation and safe space for a modern brand in general. The time to close your account was arguably last November when leadership fired all the employees and locked themselves out of the headquarters.
thats not to say theyre evacuating to another platform, just that 'no platform' is a safer option than twitter platform.
Yeah, agreed. I was one of the people who quit Twitter in November. It has been a real loss for me, going from 7k followers on Twitter to 0.1k on Mastodon. Especially now that I'll be soon starting a job hunt, I miss that. But when I review my reasons for leaving Twitter [1], I'm not regretting it. I would rather have no platform than that platform. And the calculation for brands is surely much more fraught. I expect NPR will be the beginning of a fair bit of large orgs quitting Twitter, either loudly or just tailing off.
I miss the opportunity to have my posts seen by people on Twitter, but I never had that many get seen in actuality.
Your "rather have no platform than that platform" resonates with me.
It would better if we had some way to follow the large number of valid sources of information from diverse variety of online sources within one application. Whether that ends up being Twitter, or some Federated system, I would prefer that it does not come under or remain under the control of a capricious overlord.
I absolutely understand the frustration of people who are on Twitter just to do the business of journalism, cause it does not seem like a place that is all that conducive to the market for journalism or other writing. It seems more like a public-access text-based cable-news-outrage outlet these days.
Whatever happens, someone please let me know where all the people working on AI end up, cause that's something I would like to follow without all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that happens on Twitter.
I doubt it. But it's a great way to find out about opportunities. I've had 3 jobs that I only heard about because somebody mentioned it on some social medium. One was on Twitter, one Facebook, and one in a specialist Slack.
2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy'
3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch
4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)
Also take a look at what goes on in India. If I remember correctly it took under 5 days before the whole "its going to be a free speech platform" came crashing down. I honestly like Musk overall as I believe he started companies to better humanity but to claim Musk allows organizations or people free reign on twitter is crazy at this point.
You're putting this as a known fact, but it fully relies on Elon being truthful. The Substack CEO denied this, and since he doesn't have a history of lies over the last months, I don't see any reason to give Elon the benefit of the doubt.
Can we please drop the Twitter free speech façade? We all know it's not true. He's banned activists at the behest of right wing influencers. He's banned parody accounts. He banned the account posting public flight log data of his plane. He banned people for posting links to Mastodon, then unbanned (some of?) them, then prevented people from interacting with tweets linking to Substack. If you search Twitter for "substack", it searches for "newsletter" instead!
It's so tiring having to rehash this in every conversation about Twitter, so… please, let's just acknowledge that Elon doesn't care about free speech and move on with our lives.
1) They both blog, they just don't charge subscribers for the blog articles. The bias is very evident though, as they talk about themselves.
2) No, this is not what I meant. I meant easy loan terms, otherwise they would have just gone after less competitive loans in the open market.
3) Ask Elon? He gets to kill multiple birds with one Twitter purchase. Something Bezos can't do.
4) There's a distinction between "paying for something" and "paying someone who does something", and that distinction is editorial control. Ask artists and writers who sell works for hire by specification. And tell it to those who have had their accounts locked, even under Musk's ownership.
Went searching, could find a lot of In-Q-Tel investments, but nothing about an investment in SpaceX.
What I did find is that Mike Griffin, the aerospace engineer who became the top NASA administrator in 2005, had a previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital fund for national security tech.
He invested $500 million in commercial space, eventually $396 million eventually going to SpaceX, along with $454 million of outside capital and $100 million of Musk's own money in 2006. [0]
So, if there is in In-Q-Tel investment, it is logged behind the Crunchbase paywall. That said, In-Q-Tel is an excellent idea to produce better home-grown security technology, and I have no problem with it (not even with their publicized investment in Facebook, and I consider FB a plague on humanity — that's more of a slur on In-Q-Tel than In-Q-Tel is on FB).
Why start by labelling those entities you don't like, then changing the rules to allow for this label, and then slowly adding (or not) to other entities? It would be so easy to do it in a way that doesn't seem childish.
I think he would be much more psychology healthy if he dropped social media. From what I guess about his personality, it's bad for him, and also probably doesn't address any of his psychological needs. Bad habits can be hard to break, but man does he go all in.
You know the gaming term "whale"? They're the people who get so sucked into a pay-to-play game that they'll spend thousands of dollars trying to get those winning feelings. I have to suspect those people are not, psychologically speaking, perfectly well.
If Twitter is the game, Musk is the whale with so much money that he bought the company. He spent $44 billion trying to win the game. And the wild thing to me is that he's still failing at it. Things like "let that sink in" [1] and re-labeling the building "Titter" [2] are just not very good jokes. For a mere one billion dollars, he could have hired every good comedy writer in the world. Instead he has lost at least $24 billion while generating enormous amounts of reputation-puncturing press and very plausibly putting a famously hard-to-wreck company on the path to irrelevancy. If it's not the most spectacular own-goal in business history, I'd certainly like to hear about the worse ones.
> 56% of political contributions directly to candidates from private donors who gave over $100,000, went to Democrats.
> NPR is an ally of the preferred political party of the rich.
In order to infer the second statement from the first, first you have to demonstrate that >50% of political donors (not donations) of greater than $100,000 were from Democrats. Perhaps Democract-leaning donors were merely motivated to make a bunch of donations over $100k, while Republican-leaning donors made fewer donations per donor.
It would be even better if you demonstrated that >50% of political donors above a certain wealth threshold gave to Democrats over Republicans
The website I linked bins per-donor, not per-donation. Of donations from donors who gave over $100,000 total, more went to Democrats than to Republicans.
That is irrelevant. If there was a Nazi party, you'd want NPR to favor the other parties. You haven't considered the possibility that they are biased towards truth. Guaranteed funding from the government is like academic tenure, it lets you focus on what matters rather than chasing hype/click-bait, and lets you stand up to the powers that be.
Whether or not it's applied consistently doesn't even help the situation. The goal is clearly to muddy the waters on what we mean by state-sponsored media. Even if he labels everything consistently as state-sponsored, it nonetheless serves to mask organizations without editorial independence by creating confusion within the discourse.
The problem is that Elon Musk's Twitter is being extremely selective in its labeling.
If you can think of a reason for this strange selective, seemingly targeting only certain English language sources, I'd love to hear it. Other than the "obvious" look that it seems that he's reacting petty against certain English language sources that have been critical of him, of course, because this would be my conclusion.
Yeah, but it does seem like they're doing so only in order to justify their decision on NPR. They gave NPR the label in response to a critical article from NPR, even while NPR was explicitly listed as an organisation this label didn't apply to. Since then, they've been scrambling to change rules and texts to justify a decision that was clearly made out of revenge.
looks to me like they're expanding from the ones they know first
it's strange to me that State-affiliation is seen as a pejorative, perhaps it's an American perspective - in Europe it's somewhere between a badge of honour or incidental information about the media that needs to be considered for context
It's a pejorative according to Twitter. According to their own definition, it applies to state-controlled media that don't have independent editorial control, and tweets with this label are not boosted the way other tweets can be.
I'd say editorial control subject to private interests may be worse than actual public interests. And frankly that seems to be true of all US corporate media; most US media is very pro-corporate and it's hard to find news that tells the other side of the story. On top of that, Fox News is specifically about the political interests of its owner. But none of them get labeled for it by Twitter.
But I don't see editorial control by a government for propaganda purposes as public interest; that's just the private interests of the people controlling the government. News in the public interest would be about informing the public as honestly as possible, showing the nuance, the different sides of the story, but also asking tough questions about it and getting to the bottom of the issue. Getting the truth out. Unfortunately that's not profitable enough in a capitalist media landscape.
whatever Twitter does to show the underlying institutional-level interests an account may be representing, it's very useful context IMO
npr sees it as a problem because Twitter has previously used those labels and context blurbs to weaponise their platform against accounts and messages coming from their ideological adversaries
conversely, they've given and taken blue ticks as a seal of approval and not to certify identities as the tick nominally was meant to do, going as far as removing the tick to people who stepped out of their line politically (and showering blue ticks to everyone even mildly related to the right-thinking media-government bubble)
essentially these blurbs and labels have been used almost always negatively, but right now they're out systematically pointing out the "category" of all institutional accounts, adding a bunch seemingly every day
what they are doing now it's at least superficially the correct thing to do
they now let users introduce context blurbs instead of centrally policing right-think, and they are adding ticks to government actors, and media that is either controlled, funded or affiliated to governments - in fact they should also add any funding by large foundations whether they are public or private
as a (sporadic) user this is in my interests, and it also works for them not to have to do so much speech policing in-house
> Twitter has previously used those labels and context blurbs to weaponise their platform against accounts and messages coming from their ideological adversaries
"Previously"? It's what Twitter is doing right now. That is the thing people are complaining about. It used to be used specifically to point out state propaganda channels, but Musk changed it to using for media he doesn't like. Like NPR.
> going as far as removing the tick to people who stepped out of their line politically
By making fun of Musk.
Look, you can try to spin this as if Musk is making Twitter somehow more objective and neutral, but nobody is falling for that because that's clearly not what's going on. Musk is running Twitter as his personal propaganda platform, boosting himself and accounts he approves of, and hiding those he disapproves of. It's about his personal preference now.
> now they're out systematically pointing out the "category" of all institutional accounts
"State-affiliated media" is exactly what NPR is not. Their own explanation of that category explicitly listed NPR as an example of NOT state-affiliated media. And it clearly doesn't fit their definition of it, but Musk put it in there anyway, because he wanted to punish them for criticising him. I think they have by now created a new less-wrong category for it: "government funded", but the fact of the matter is that NPR is primarily funded by donations.
Is he also pointing out "corporate funded media", by the way? Because that would also be a really useful category to point out.
It's not irrelevant. I think it's a useful distinction.
All companies have PR departments (except, of course, Twitter, which only responds with poop emoji.)
Company PR departments generally report on the company and things which directly affect the company. They issue press releases and they comment on litigation and they celebrate anniversaries.
Journalism organizations and public information outlets don't merely report on themselves, they report on the world, or topics of interest to their advertisers or donors or governments or supporters. Therefore there's a wider range and there's a third-party nature to it. Journalists may be investigative, or sometimes they may just regurgitate press releases from various companies. From wide ranges of different types of various companies. Even if a news outlet reports only on dentistry, there's still a wide range of dental topics that are covered, not just Colgate and their toothpaste.
So I agree; NPR should be properly labeled according to the government which supports them. So should PBS, right? There's no shame in that. Why don't Facebook and Google do it too? YouTube regularly slaps a label on government mouthpieces that I tune into there. It's important to be even-handed and label the Chinese and Russians the same as the Venezuelans and Germans and Irish and Catholics and Orthodox the same as the United States.
I actually don't think it's a useful distinction, since the topic is media, not media companies. SpaceX's and Tesla's social media accounts are media, and they're both as state-affiliated, if not moreso, than NPR
folks reading posts by Tesla and SpaceX should know that aside from elmu's history of disingenuousness and outright lying, such posts are even more likely to be pro-government biased than NPR
so I agree: SpaceX and Tesla should be labeled according to the government which supports them, there's no shame in that.
The labels are for media publishers. They are to make readers aware of the motivations of the writers. This was Twitter practice long before Musk. He just removed the bias toward not labeling US media companies.
Why would SpaceX need a label? “Warning: this rocket fuel is affiliated with the US government so maybe don’t trust it’s opinion on open flames”
An org that primarily sells media (PBS or Twitter) should live by what its primary revenue source is for that media, because it colors the media that goes out the door.
Further, are the bulk of twitter's profits derived from concessions on a lease ? I don't think so, but I'm open minded.
An org that does not sell media, but physical goods (i.e. Tesla) is arguably selling cars, not media.
I'd say its more like serious politics games. Yes, anyone who is interested in material reality knows that all media institutions are controlled by wealthy people, governments, and so on. No, that doesn't mean there isn't real benefit to some groups in projecting the illusion of their independence while simultaneously sewing doubt about the independence of other media. Material reality is a fringe idea pursued by a small minority (and shrinking all the time).
Twitter is a social network. It may have media features, but its not a media company like NYT, NPR; etc. They don't create or practice journalism. They're a platform.
There's more to media than journalism. Twitter is not merely a platform, it's a platform for communication. A medium. I'd say that makes it a media company.
EDIT: lots of discussion around this. Twitter is literally a social media company. You can split hairs on whether the “media” part of “social media” agrees with your bias here.
Some companies are even both. But in the main, Twitter is the thing that employs developers and writes code and not the thing that employs reporters and writes stories.
Here we go again...under this view, every company is a "tech" company. Does GE or John Deere write software for their hardware? Absolutely. Are they colloquially considered "tech" companies? No.
Twitter is a media company (they distribute media). Tech is their operating model to deliver media. As is Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. etc.
Tech isn't twitter's primary line of business, either. The company's value derives from the users and the content they generate. Their tech isn't unique or impressive, and nobody's there for the tech, they're there for the content.
Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
> The company's value derives from the users and the content they generate.
So you're conceding that Twitter isn't the entity generating the content.
> Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
> By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
Deere's customers are there for the tech. They're handing over money for it.
Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not saying we should call John Deere a tech company—I don't think it's the best label, even as a very broad one, for what they do—but I do think Twitter is so not one that it'd make more sense to call Deere a tech company than Twitter.
> Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
John Deere designs their own tractors. Their customers want tractors. They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Foxconn is a factory company. The thing people want from them is manufacturing. Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple. If they had no factories they would have no business.
Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates. Their users want to talk to each other, in the same way as John Deere's customers want harvested crops. But the way Twitter provides that service is through computers and software.
Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Do you think technology is a notable differentiator for Twitter?
Are new users (or actual customers—advertisers, blue-checks these days, which, LOL) signing up because they want access to the technology?
If another company cloned 100% of Twitter's proprietary technology, perfectly, how would investors react to that company, if that's all they've got?
If that company offered that tech for sale, outright, straight-up IP transfer, a single bidder owns the whole thing, what percentage of Twitter's value would that tech command on the market?
> They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Twitter could completely outsource their software development and still sell advertising to its customers.
> Foxconn is a factory company.
Wtf does this even mean? Foxconn is a semiconductor manufacturer...
> Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple.
Oh great, so Apple isn't a tech company anymore? Don't they write code that powers the back-end of virtually every iPhone in existence (backup, iCloud, iMessage, App Store, etc. etc.).
> Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates.
So how do you explain all of the sales people? Or the content regulation? Or the support? fun fact - when it was publicly traded Twitter spent nearly equally on R&D as it did S&M.
> Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Because this is OUTSOURCED. It's user generated content.
Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech". Microsoft as an example is heavily diversified and as a software publisher they sell ERP software, operating system software, business productivity software, etc. Technology is what allows them to produce and run that software.
> A media company is the thing that produces media
> Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech".
"Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software, but these are definitely things that companies produce and sell for money, or produce and offer as services.
But why are we talking about what counts as a tech company when the issue is what counts as a media company? If Microsoft was a "Cloud Services" instead of a "tech" company, Azure still wouldn't be a media entity.
The internet, like broadcast television and cable, is a medium of transmission. But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC, not Panasonic.
> "Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software
No it doesn't. That's my point. Tech isn't an industry or a category. It's an operating model. The delineation of it being an industry adds nothing of value to any discussion because its so ill-defined.
> But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC
Guess what...NBC merged with Comcast and Comcast is a telecomm company, which guess what...distributes media.
So any company that uses internet servers to run code they wrote is a tech company? John Deere wrote the firmware on the machinery they sold to farmers that connects to a server on software they wrote. Are they a tech company?
GE writes a massive amount of software. Not just for their hardware products, but all sorts of other stuff that most folks won’t ever run across.
It’s a mess of a company for sure, but just because their software isn’t common on the web, I’d still classify them as a tech company.
I think of Twitter as a media outlet. They don’t directly employ news writers, but just about all media flows through Twitter in some form or fashion. They’re intrinsically linked to the media landscape.
They are absolutely "tech". Either automotive tech or agricultural tech. I mean, if you want to be totally pedantic about it, go for it. Doesn't make it accurate though.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter have always been whatever they can aggressively monetize, as their primary piece of software hasn't financially scaled to where they need to be at quarter-after-quarter. These days, I'd say they're advertisement companies!
Various companies in China are on US embargo lists because they are state-affiliated. Parsing out "media" companies is just hyper-targeting of ire. All companies that post tweets are effectively media. So why only highlight "news media" on a publication app such as Twitter?
The label is "state-affiliated media" so it makes sense that the label isn't applied to Twitter or SpaceX, not because they aren't state-affiliated, but because they aren't media.
And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased, as opposed to e.g. Raytheon which is objectively state-affiliated but nobody expects to be doing objective reporting.
If a media outlet is being funded by the government then readers should know that because it could affect their coverage if they fear losing that funding as a result of critical reporting. This directly applies to NPR because Republicans regularly threaten to remove its public funding in response to their coverage.
The better criticism is, why is the label applied to NPR but not e.g. MSNBC? Pretty sure at least Comcast (MSNBC's parent company) receives a significant amount of government funding.
What kind of evidence are you looking for here? The effect of financial incentives on human behavior is well-established.
Meanwhile case-specific evidence is largely unavailable. Reporters would be loathe to admit to being cowed, but are also aware that corporate executives make decisions on things like promotions and timeslots based on the bottom line, or in less well-funded entities that a loss of funding can directly lead to a loss of employment.
How about statistical evidence? Well, if Republicans are threatening NPR with the loss of funding, they could slant their coverage to placate the legislators criticizing them, or they could slant it the other way to bolster their support from the other party. In either case it compromises their neutrality, but now you can find "evidence" of this in any divergence from neutrality in either direction. Since they couldn't reasonably be expected to be infallible in the alternative, that doesn't prove anything.
So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
frankly, any evidence besides zero would be good, but ideally any evidence which is convincing. It's up to the conspiracy theorist, not the audience, to come up with such evidence, whatever it may be.
an example of evidence of such a conspiracy theory would be internal emails telling a reporter to go easy on the US government because a small portion of funding comes from it, or to attack X because the US government wants them to
statistical evidence would work too if it proves the claims of bias somehow, I leave it to you to figure out some examples
> So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
Ad Fontes tries to rate news media on the type of reporting it does and the general political skew. This doesn't capture everything, but it can be done. Except for specific topics I think it's slightly better than incentives in general, though incentives are important too.
Social media companies are media distribution companies. They're analogous to the street-corner newspaper and magazine shop, except they only occasionally pay their content producers. They're more related to media than cyberspace is to space.
> And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased
This has never been the case. Never. While some journalism sources operate in a facts-only manner, all journalistic sources have bias as to which stories they research. And historically, the press has been about propaganda, editorials, and selling papers at least as much as about reporting.
Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing". The major reason to so label them is, itself, propaganda. With the second reason being a warning to the reader to practice even more diligence than normal.
> Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing".
By your own reasoning, those other labels would be redundant. Whereas "government-affiliated" makes the reader aware of a specific kind of bias that not all media entities are subject to.
It's less helpful when those are the only news organizations that get a label. At least in the past newspapers would helpfully label themselves as the political party they supported. There's even still a Herald-Whig :) .
I know China requires Communist party committees within most large businesses. It would surprise me if this is not also the case for their news media. Note that these aren't affiliations, but actual political organizations within the businesses.
The Republicans control the house. The US is not a land of political "rulers", at least not at the moment (arguments can be made for FDR's presidency).
If you build editorial independent into a legal charter, and have a government that isn't authoritarian and protects the rule of law, why is it a contradiction?
Member stations are federally funded. Member stations pay NPR.
To say that NPR doesn’t receive a significant portion of its budget from the federal government is a lie. This same argument is made whenever a politico mentions cutting funding to NPR. There is a large push to claim that NPR receives very little funding and it’s irrelevant to the network.
But you can’t have it both ways. The lady doth protest too mightily.
> In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities.[34][63] While NPR does not receive any direct federal funding, it does receive a small number of competitive grants from CPB and federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce.[34] This funding amounts amounted to less than 0.1% of revenues, according to its 2020 public filings.
I'm not from the US so don't know the politics of this discussion, but it seems like NPR is funded more by the public directly, as well as the public sphere (foundations, universities, etc) than by the public sector. Do you have a source to the contrary?
Not OP, but I would have said misleading instead of lying.
To get the correct figure, you need to add together not just federal money for NPR but also state government money, and federal and state money for its affiliates and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR only functions in an ecosystem, and the total figure for that ecosystem is at least 14 percent according to... NPR [1]. I suspect the real figure is somewhat obscured because some of their non-government donors will get some of their money from the government(s). I do not think the public media ecosystem would exist with 14 percent less money, but I could be wrong.
“Public Broadcasters Fear ‘Collapse’ if U.S. Drops Support,” announced a New York Times headline in March of 2017. Michael Grynbaum and Ben Sisario reported for the Times:
Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The potential elimination of about $445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget.
The Federal Government prints the dollar. If you buy something with that dollar, did the Federal Government fund your expense?
It's just as disingenuous to say NPR is directly funded by the Federal government as it is to say NPR receives little money from the Federal Government since it gets a lot of money from CPB which actually gets money from Congress.
Federally funded != State Affiliated. There is no one from the Biden Administration telling them what to say. By labeling them as such, Elon/Twitter are implying that NPR has a Goebbels-like figure running it, which is mendacious at best.
Perhaps more relevantly, by expanding the use of labels indicative of state association beyond the original use of “state-affiliated media” for those orgs which are editorially controlled by governments, Musk decreases the impact and clear distinction of that label, further normalizing and empowering the actual editorially-controlled state propaganda outlets operating on Twitter.
NPR was founded by the CPB, which was created with an act of Congress and is governed by a board of directors selected by the President. If it's "mendacious" to claim NPR is state affiliated, presumably it would be completely accurate and correct to state NPR, an entity that was founded and continues to be funded by a federal government body run by presidential appointees is "not state-affiliated"?
Yes that's how words work, NPR is not State Affiliated media. No one from the government is there dictating what they report on or what projects they pursue. When a lab at a private college takes NIH funding to do research, that does not make the private research institution state affiliated. When oil and gas companies accept government subsidies, they are not labeled as state affiliated (and in this case oil and gas are far more deeply intertwined with the levers of government). Elon Musk is a reactionary polemic and these choices are obviously intended to further those goals.
"There is no undisputed definition of state media or government media. The most common definition of state media or government media refers to any media organization that is either directly or indirectly owned or operated by the state.[4]"
"...State or government media can range from media outlets that are completely under state control to editorially independent public service media outlets.[1] The term "public media" can be used to refer to state or government media and public service broadcasting (PBS). Although there are differences between them. According to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, state and government media are directly controlled by the state or government; and PBS are not.[7] According to Facebook, state-controlled media are "partially or wholly under the editorial control of a government".[8]"
Interestingly:
"Twitter uses the term "state-affiliated media" and defines it as "outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution." At the same time, "state-financed" editorially independent media are not considered "state-affiliated".[9][10]"
"The goal of the ACE network is to provide knowledge to people working in the field elections, with the intention of supporting credible and transparent electoral processes with emphasis on sustainability, professionalism and trust. "
I wonder if this will have any domino effect, right now the only thing holding Twitter together is its network effects. According to the article on NPR's site[0], they have 8.7 million followers and run 52 different accounts so Twitter is losing a pretty important partner.
Also, no mention of Mastodon in this announcement. It sounds like they're just going to use Facebook for the time being.
Everyone likes to blame the server interface, but honestly that's not so bad and I think most people get over it.
Mastodon's real problem in my opinion is that its primary audience today doesn't actually want anyone new to join - it's VERY toxic for newcomers who don't fit a specific mold. It's a shame, cause we really do need something new.
I'm hoping some of the new decentralized ones take off.
Edit: I think the comment about this being survivor bias is fair, but I still believe the community itself is a bigger hurdle for Mastodon than the signup flow
I'm pretty technical, but neither of those were the reasons I quickly abandoned Mastodon.
I don't care about federation, and I want algorithmic discovery. Specific I want to follow all sorts of people from around the world (on multiple mastodon servers) and have more people suggested to me based on that. Mastodon can't even reliably search across servers.
This is survivor bias. If you're a non-tech person signing up for a new service, the federation aspect is just wizard talk and it's not obvious what difference it makes. Most people do not want to go on side quests to find other people they know or figure out which digital village they live in, especially not as the first stage in the onboarding process.
People manage to deal with this when they sign up for their email account. It's just that we don't (yet) have the equivalent of gmail (or hotmail, aol before that) as a default option.
I understand the hesitancy in some respects. Longtime Mastodon users fear a mass migration of the toxic elements of Twitter into what has been their private sphere. If Mastodon becomes Twitter 2.0 then we have solved nothing.
It's a well-founded concern, too. Every new wave has a cacophony of people demanding it change to work exactly like Twitter so they don't have to learn anything new or change, dooming them to experience exactly what they left if they got their way.
It reminds me of how Metro Atlanta has grown. People move out a bit to get away from Atlanta traffic. Then they miss all the stuff they had in Atlanta, and start clamoring for all they miss from where they moved from. It often starts with a Target or a movie theater. Ten years on, they're complaining about Atlanta traffic again, and they move. And the cycle repeats until half of North Georgia is consumed by a web of crumbling asphalt roads dangling off packed highways.
The difference here is Mastodon, as a community, said "No. Learn a new way or buzz off." Most people buzz off, and occasionally complain about how hostile the community was to them to anyone who'll listen. Some people stick around and appreciate the different way of doing things. Repeat.
I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter.
The challenge is that it's intentionally difficult to find your community on there unless you're invited in from an existing connection outside of Mastodon. I understand that's how some people want it - but blaming users for not understanding how to "learn a new way" in the first place IS hostile - whether you want to hear it or not.
Ultimately, doesn't matter. Mastodon will be what it will be, and folks like me will find something else that's a little more welcoming to people who aren't quite as my-tribe-only focused.
>> "I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter."
The first "recommended" server on the Mastodon's official website was something about anime, and the second seemed to be about some "Queer friendly furry community", whatever that means. Then there was one about tech and and the local Bay Area one.
At least, unlike GNU Ring (or whatever it's called nowadays) it didn't just crash on startup.
Twitter has always been a cesspool. You're fighting not only other people but also the algorithm / popularity contest. I actually hate it and never want to go back, but for some it's engaging. People probably don't use Mastodon just cause nobody they care about is on it and the whole multi-instance thing is weird.
That hasn't been my experience. I joined a couple months ago and I have yet to see a single instance of toxicity in my feeds or replies. But I am guessing it greatly depends on the type of groups and content you interact with.
The great thing about Mastodon is that it doesn't push anything in my face that I didn't subscribe to.
I could believe that it's possible to stumble upon an instance that fits who you are and offers a great onboarding experience - but it's far from the norm.
The reason I'm confident saying that is that it's actually by design for the platform. The community is very hostile towards any kind of discovery tools or enhancements that help you explore the network without a direct introduction. Any attempt to provide that functionality is blasted with an intense amount of aggression and shut down.
My experience was bad. A lot of servers my friends used didn't take new sign ups so I was forced to pick my own which went offline a few weeks later and I haven't tried using it since because there's no indicator of server quality that I know of and all the servers with a lot of active users are not taking signups. Recommendations from HN would be appreciated.
I use social.coop, and it seems to work well. They have some kind of participatory administration too that I don't know very well.
My recommendation is to find an instance with some kind of governance plan, and hopefully a stable stream of donations. Volunteer instances indeed could go at any time. And of course, if you can, donate to one or a few instances out of good citizenship.
I think it's also worth mentioning there are other services built around ActivityPub as well (and federation). I found friendica pretty good (as a Mastodon/facebook alternative), although I don't use it.
This will always be a problem with federated vs unfederated services. It's hard to get a network effect when things are so spread out without a central place.
You don't need a central place, but you do need places that are large enough, mainstream enough, and trusted enough, for the masses. Email is like this now.
If people wanted email 2.0 they wouldn't have flocked to social media 1.0 and begun doing most of their correspondence through messaging instead of email.
but that's not how you use email. you don't sign up for an email account, and then go searching for other users to follow and what not with in the same server.
with social platforms, you do just that. you want to see a centralized list of available users to choose to follow or subscribe or join cult or whatever.
i'm deliberately using centralized here as not needing to know that multiple servers exist with different users in each. maybe i'm showing my ignorance of mastodon, but it seems like mastodon.com or whatever central website could just publish a list that mastodon clients can refer to rather than making users discovery a hunt and fetch kind of process. like a torrent index site. if that already exists, then i'll TIL the workings of mastodon. if it doesn't exists, then it seems very short sited.
I don't think they "blew it" but it could have been better. I think it would be better if they have a blurb about how it is very much like email; you pick a provider and sign up then after that you can message anyone else via your "address" and provider. Also, they could be a LOT more clear about which instances are accepting new signups.
I don't think there's anything they can really do about that. It's a federated platform, the user is going to have to pick a server. Aside from some landing page that shows you servers based on your interests, I don't know what else they could do.
I do agree that migrating between servers could be a more streamlined process though.
Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain. They could even have had a signup form on their .org website that would return “Your account has been created! Yours is on [xyz].com! But don’t worry, it will connect to other accounts from all others of the federation.”
luckily you didn't need to guess, because it's presented as the first entry, including the information that it is run by the company, when you go look at the .org page for where to sign up, just as you wanted.
But I'm sure you'll find another reason why doing exactly what you suggested isn't reasonable.
You joke, but Mastodon could’ve learned from the history there, at least in the US. AOL in particular had a huge mainstream user base that didn’t really understand what was AOL and what was Internet. Witgout that gentle introduction, yes, many would’ve have been stuck trying to figure out which company to use to get online for longer.
AOL also charged you $15 a month for an email subdomain, whereas on Mastodon that kind of lock-in wouldn't exist. Creating an AOL-like company for Mastodon doesn't work unless your ultimate goal is to be blocked by every major federated community.
Sure. AOL was also a commercial service and joining Mastodon.social is free. A facade over the Internet would look different than a facade over a federated social network in many ways.
This is by design, Mastodon goal was never to replace Twitter, it's an alternative but with different goals. Mastodon isn't a centralized platform. This is good. The people that after a broad global audience shouldn't expect Mastodon to replace Twitter. Mastodon is its own thing.
> But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.
I'm not entirely sure that's a bug. Specifically, I'm curious whether it squelches non-niche conversations like: Are vaccines a nefarious plot by Bill Gates to implant mind-control chips?
Last week, the Federal Reserve issued an important update on twitter. So no, I don't think twitter is worried about losing NPR. Twitter has the strongest network effects of any contemporary social network.
Well, I'm sure they didn't issue it only on twitter, right? That'd just be part of their normal media processes. Post it on the website. Post it on twitter. Post it on Facebook. Send press releases to media outlets. Blah blah blah.
I think the Dominoes have been falling for a while. I mostly quit the bird in November. I pop over once or twice a week these days to see what's happening and the degradation of content is very apparent. It may be because of departures or it may be because his constant weaponizing, sorry monetizing, of the algorithm but it's a lot quieter. A lot of the people I liked to follow from our industry are gone. It's a stark contrast to what the app was even a year ago. All while their CEO rebrands them as Titter and has people repaint signs.
The most recent gaff of exposing people "private" circles to the main feed (including private nudes) is probably going to create a new slew of legal issues.
I would assume a single account with 8.7 million followers isn't a big deal to Twitter. It's not like the 8.7 million NPR followers are unique to NPR and are going to disappear. Those 8.7 million followers probably follow 8.7 million other things themselves.
I'd be willing to guess a single Kardashian has more followers than NPR (maybe I'm too cynical). Eventually, the way Musk is running Twitter, he'll give a free blue check mark for the Brawndo Corp. Maybe he could just rename Twitter to "Ow, my balls"
That’s true to some extent but NPR and its people provide a ton of timely content which keeps users active. People like the “what’s going on” aspect and news organizations disproportionately help provide that.
Worst case, Twitter can set up something like "system accounts" that automatically fetch headlines from news websites or RSS feeds and post them with links on Twitter.
If I was a newsie that had an account on a platform that tried to negatively impact the reach of my account on that platform, you better believe I would go out of my way to restrict access to any of my feeds/api/whatevs to said platform. If my account is not okay by their standards for my account to exist unencumbered, why would it be okay by their standards to aggregate via a feed just to get some retention of their users. Capital F that noise
How do you even block one organization from accessing your RSS feeds or your homepage HTML while allowing others to access it? How do you tell apart my requests and Twitter's requests if they both come from a residential IP or a common VPN?
These are companies, they work with the law: put terms of use on your content which ban cloaking your identity. When the unique identifier you put in your feeds shows up on the unauthorized profile, you now have evidence not only that they were illegally using your content but also they knew that and were trying to defeat an access control mechanism.
At that point, all of the big content companies are on your side – none of them are going for a “but we really want to use their content without paying for it!” argument – and it further increases the number of people reconsidering their continued use of the site.
8.7 million followers but take a look at their feed. Go back a week in time (for a snapshot) and the like/retweets/comments are generally in the 10s or low hundreds, with a few exceptions (low thousands). Same with NYT. Last time I looked they had 50+ million followers with similar low engagement.
So how many of their followers are bots and what’s NPRs true value to Twitter? I don’t know. I’ve got a small 5k following and I have similar engagement.
Most twitter account followers are nothing but bots. Millions of 'followers' but likes and retweets only in the dozens.
It also makes for huge egos. Like, they know they bought all their followers, but they wake up one day and forget, and start to believe their own bullshit.
To be fair it is everywhere, youtube accounts will millions of followers do the same. Never more than 200 comments or likes on them.
Seems to me the only organic accounts are the ones with only a few K.
I assume anything with 100k-1 million followers is 95% bots.
No one ever thought it was odd that these accounts all got their million followers in the first few days of acct creation, then literally didnt gain any more ever?
Or how odd it is that every celebrity or business just happened to hit 1mil+?
I got 0 engagement with hundreds of real followers by the end, but the situation got worse every year with a tangible nosedive in the new era. This was a carefully curated following where I blocked and reported every bot that showed up. The problem is Twitter.
Low engagement does not absolutely equate paid bots. Twitter is ooold. I bet the overwhelming majority of NPR followers are inactive accounts by people who signed up somewhere in the '10s and went to the website twice.
And too bad, also, since the On The Media hosts seem to have joined a journalist-centric server that would have been the perfect place for them: https://journa.host/about
I wouldn't envy the hosts having to read our their addresses but npr.org could absolutely implement WebFinger if they were thus inclined
> Also, no mention of Mastodon in this announcement. It sounds like they're just going to use Facebook for the time being.
I think it is time that we can call it a day after 7 years, and we should also admit that the Mastodon experiment has become unviable, unscalable, obsolete and already extinct as a serious alternative against Twitter. It had its slither of a chance, and it still failed.
Maybe a lesson in networks effects will tell you why the 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still continue to use the platform. Unsurprisingly.
I am viewing Twitter more than before because I am attracted to the open speech where political banning is no longer occurring. I do not know all who have been blocked under Musk but it feels more open.
Fox News probably had more followers when they stopped posting on Twitter a few years ago. Not to mention all the right wing momentum behind Parler, Gab, Telegram, Truth Social etc. didn't make a noticeable dent.
It depends on the perception one has of the US govt. If one considers them benign and aligns with their policy, 1% seems is not a big deal. If one doesn't, even 1% funding is considered influence. Imagine one politician you don't like receiving 1% from the Russian or North Korean government, or say from the Meta corp, I wouldn't have a problem calling out them as being "funded" or even "influenced".
> What business would turn around and say : "We don't need that 1%, you can have it back".
The one which would try to claim independence and non-influence from said entity?
> It's state affiliated. Like Tesla. Like any company who received covid relief. Tax breaks etc.
So... everyone and everything is state affiliated and should be labeled as such?
That's obviously not the case. State affiliated should be limited to organizations that are influenced/controlled significantly by the state, which NPR is not. This is actually the definition that Twitter advertises.
I believe the "state affiliated media" tagline is as you might guess, intended for media who's editorial opinions should be taken with their state affiliation in context. What utility does it serve to label SpaceX, Tesla, Lockheed, Boeing, or any other company that does not publish editorial opinions as "state affiliated". I don't get what people don't understand here.
NPR and PBS would not exist right now or in the future if their government funding grants were revoked. That puts a nonexistent bias on their editorial decisions. I seem to remember NPR "leaking"/breaking the story on WMDs in Iraq with one of their journalists directly quoting internal contacts in the Pentagon as their source. They are clearly far from immune to being used as agents of propaganda. That being said, I personally hold both NPR & PBS Newshour in very high regard. I do think that placing them in them in the same categorisation as RT or even the BBC is reductionist. Perhaps there should be varying levels of "state affiliated media" labeling.
This isn't just about NPR itself. They depend on local broadcast networks to reach their audience. How much does government grants influence the local stations? I know in my state, the majority of local public radio funding comes from the government.
if "every penny counts", and the federal government gives them a single penny, then by definition they owe their continued existence to the federal government.
there is a difference between a company that makes electric automobiles, and a company that influences the thoughts and (crucially) feelings of the populace through opinion and reporting.
we all agree that all of these things are true for government-dependent media organizations outside of the West, but for some reason many refuse to believe that the same thing happens here domestically.
In 2022, CPB got $465M from the Federal government. Of that, $72M goes to "Direct grants to local public radio stations", $24M to "Radio National Program Production and Acquisition grants" and $7.3M to "Radio Program Fund".
Using 4.5% as the percentage of of the $72M from CPB that ends up as part of the 1/3rd of NPRs revenue. 4.5% x 33% = ~1.5%.
I gather then that even though it's a small part of NPR's revenue, it's very high leverage in helping to keep all of the member stations afloat. I guess that's how they can simultaneously downplay the dollar amount while also speaking of how critical it is.
> Because the bulk of NPRs funding comes from the dues of member stations most of which are non-profits and receive funding from a myriad of sources.
From wikipedia:
Although NPR receives less than 1% of its direct funding from the federal government, member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from state governments, and also the US government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
31% of their funding comes from member stations. 13% of member station funding comes from government sources. In total that would make about 31% * 13% = 4%.
It doesn't really change anything, either way NPR have stated that federal funding is essential to their operation.
Doesn't seem outlandish to call them government funded if the government is funding essential operations. Some of the same people who go on ad nauseam about how Tesla and SpaceX have received government funding are curiously resistant to the idea though.
> It doesn't really change anything, either way NPR have stated that federal funding is essential to their operation.
Every organization on earth refers to every penny of its budget as "essential" as to not lose any of it. Obviously they could still exist and find a way to replace 1% of their total budget if necessary.
> Every organization on earth refers to every penny of its budget as "essential" as to not lose any of it.
Untrue.
> Obviously they could still exist and find a way to replace 1% of their total budget if necessary.
They chose to represent themselves as having their essential operations funded by the government. Even if that was a lie, perceptions are very important when it comes to conflicts of interest, transparency, public funding, politics, and independence. The entire basis of their protest to Twitter is about the perception created by the "government funded" label. So lying to the public about something like that for an allegedly insignificant amount of money would be a singularly idiotic thing for NPR to do.
Right, organizations routinely admit they are getting too much funding and ask for it to be reduced. There are so many examples of this, perhaps you could provide just one?
> They chose to represent themselves as having their essential operations funded by the government
Again, so they don't lose that funding. I don't think any of them could have predicted a right wing billionaire would buy Twitter and give them a misleading label because he doesn't understand the difference between state and public media.
> Right, organizations routinely admit they are getting too much funding and ask for it to be reduced. There are so many examples of this, perhaps you could provide just one?
I have been in several situations where I have been asked to prioritize and categorize essential and non-essential funding. Not for public / public funded / government jobs, so it's not necessarily made public. But it obviously happens.
If they don't want to outright admit it so openly is one thing, but lying about their operations and public funding is quite another.
> Again, so they don't lose that funding.
That didn't address the content of my reply. You're just repeating the same thing again lol, so same reply applies.
> I don't think any of them could have predicted a right wing billionaire would buy Twitter and give them a misleading label because he doesn't understand the difference between state and public media.
The label that might mislead people into believing the government provides essential funding for their operation?
>I have been in several situations where I have been asked to prioritize and categorize essential and non-essential funding. Not for public / public funded / government jobs, so it's not necessarily made public. But it obviously happens.
What you were asked to do sounds more like an audit, which isn't what i'm talking about. Government organizations (or non-profits, NGOs, etc.) don't announce to the world they don't need as much money as they are getting. Or if they do, i'm still waiting on an example.
> but lying about their operations and public funding is quite another
Don't know how you got there, clearly not what i'm saying.
> The label that might mislead people into believing the government provides essential funding for their operation?
I have a question. The House GOP tweeted out "Defund @NRP" - Elon tweeted the same thing a hour later, highlighting the "essential funding". How does that work? How does the entire right wing internet get behind the same talking points all at once?
Losing 1% (or 4% depending how you look at funding) will not make any organization go away, use basic logic. They are clearly saying that as to not disrupt future funding.
> What you were asked to do sounds more like an audit, which isn't what i'm talking about. Government organizations (or non-profits, NGOs, etc.) don't announce to the world they don't need as much money as they are getting. Or if they do, i'm still waiting on an example.
So, goalpost moving?
> Don't know how you got there, clearly not what i'm saying.
Sounds like you are. Either they're lying or the government funds essential operations.
> I have a question.
How about you address what I wrote first before you keep deflecting. I don't give a rats ass about "the house GOP" and they have nothing to do with what we're talking about.
> Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that make up an important part of a diverse revenue mix that includes listener support, corporate sponsorship and grants. Stations, in turn, draw on this mix of public and privately sourced revenue to pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming.
The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.
This came more or less directly from our NPR station in DC as they talked about fund raising in their many, many drives. And this wasn't for the station itself, I believe this was for NPR, since they then went on to talk about how many stations, mostly in rural areas, had a funding inverse of that.
Basically, if you are listening to NPR outside a major population center, then its almost certainly because Federal dollars make that possible. And if you listen and contribute to a major station, then you are one of the few that pay the 90% or so of the budget for the content on NPR.
You’re conflating the local NPR affiliate with the news company and radio content aggregator. It like you’re saying that my local NBC station is owned by NBC News, when it’s locally owned (well, in my case owned by a company with a lot of stations, but not NBC itself).
Less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes directly from the government itself through competitive grants, etc.
Some of the budget comes from member stations (presumably more than 1%) who themselves receive some level of state or federal funding. Those are the entities that receive ~10% of their budgets from a government of one kind or another (the rest coming from donations or other non-profit funding). But those stations can get content from a variety of other public radio sources. I believe NPR can (did?) handle some of the distribution of non-NPR content via their satellite services.
Originally NPR was directly funded by the CPB to a much greater extent. However that changed substantially in the 80s when the stations themselves started receiving funding from the CPB instead of NPR.
> The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.
If that's accurate, then I'd love for NPR to explain the order of magnitude gap between their claim of 1% and that 10% figure. That's a huge difference.
to upon_drumhead: Federal funding laundered through sub-orgs that share the same "NPR" branding is still federal funding.
>Most of NPR's funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.
NPR is one of several providers to individual public radio stations. The government supports those individual stations; they use some of that support to purchase programs from NPR, American Public Media, PRX, etc.
If you look at the breakdown lower in the page, 31% of NPR's revenue comes from member station licensing fees and of the member station funding 13% comes from government sources, so in total that would be 4%.
I think it has more to do with preserving the fiction that they're significantly more independent from commercial interests than other news media. Losing dedicated public funding would make them a commercial network that also begs for donations a few times a year, probably harming donation and removing some of the halo-effect that advertisers are looking for by "sponsoring" them (paying for ads).
In short, it'd push them farther out of the ad niche they've carved for themselves, which could have serious revenue consequences beyond that 1%.
Grocery stores traditionally or supposedly only make 1% to 3% profit. These days it's probably 1%. So I'd say 1% is a lot if it's the thing keeping the company from going under if that income disappears.
Disconnect between direct federal funding and aggregate funding from a variety of public institutions or grants from publicly funded NGOs at national/state/local levels I imagine.
Let’s graph all their sponsors and their connection to the corporations that also puppet our elected officials. My guess is the vast majority of their funding looks like:
Let's say you're being paid $1k per month by your job. You would say you receive almost nothing, right? Simultaneously, you would also say what you do get is essential to your livelihood. Same here, larger scale.
That's not an accurate analogy if what you're saying the $1k/month is your entire pay.
More accurate would be saying I make a $100k/month of which $1k comes for a certain source, and then me saying that thousand is essential to my livelihood. I'd be lying if I said that; I make a whole lot less than $100k/month and I could easily forgo $1k/month today which just goes into my savings anyways.
It's disingenuous to talk as if the relationship to NPR content to their funding is some simple linear relationship.
Every penny of their income is important. If they had less content to provide to member stations, those stations would have less content and would pull in fewer donations. It then becomes a death spiral since less content results in fewer donations.
While federally originated dollars are a small portion of NPR's total income they're not unimportant since they can't be replaced by other sources. A 1% reduction in income means they need to reduce expenses by 1%.
In your analogy, $1k/month goes into savings. Losing that wouldn't break you financially. You're not spending your all of your income. If you were you'd need to cut your expenses by the $1k/month. In that case you'd consider that 1% pretty important.
What's there to address? 1% stable funding is still 1% you can rely on, just because you receive additional funds from private sectors or alternative sources that are unreliable, doesn't negate this. You can literally see this in CPB funding, where private sources are incredibly variable, and that is what CPB gets, NPR is only allotted a portion.
NPR's funding does not come solely from direct appropriation. NPR receives a higher amount of federal funding than what is commonly believed. It is difficult to determine the exact amount of federal funding because it is hidden within the fees paid by local affiliates. These local affiliates receive a significant portion of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is itself funded by federal tax dollars.
Congressional appropriation > Corporation for Public Broadcasting > grants for local affiliates > fee paid to NPR
I'm sure NPR does some good work, and while I believe it is biased, I've found it to be less biased than CNN or MSNBC. I don't understand why NPR objects to being labeled as either state funded or state affiliated. It was established by an act of Congress, for one thing, and according to its own website, and its own disclosures, it does depend on federal funding. And that figure is substantially more than the claimed 1%. The 1% funding figure is misleading because it implies that the only kind of state funding is that coming directly from the federal government. The figure is much higher when you consider indirect state funding, the fact of NPR taking in dues from affiliates that are substantially dependent on federal grants or state and local grants or money that comes from public schools and public universities, all of which are funded by or subsidized by government.
In addition to the 1% figure being a lie, the writer of this piece failed to disclose that he is literally an employee of NPR. I guess it wasn't difficult to find out, but still...
The "state affiliated" label on Twitter was originally applied to sources that are not editorially independent from their states. Twitter put this label on NPR, then removed an explicit mention of NPR as non-state-affiliated from their public policy related to the label, then removed the mention of editorial independence from the policy entirely, then changed the label to "state funded."
I think it's easy to see why NPR objected to the initial "affiliated" labeling, and that they see the new one as just a quick wording change to try to bat back some criticism, but that it carries the same stigma.
The poster here on HN just happened to post the version from WBUR's website. Also, I don't know if it was edited later or not, but the piece both on NPR's site and WBUR's site has a disclosure at the end explicitly stating that it's NPR reporting on itself.
I'm not sure I care. To me, state funded is the same as state affiliated. The important thing is not that npr is labelled one way or the other. Everyone knows what NPR is and what the BBC is. Most fair people figure they have a bias but that sometimes they still do good work. The important thing is that by being consistent, and by labelling journalists and media brands like RT and the Chinese state media organs using the same rules we apply to npr and the BBC, we help information consumers understand when they're likely being propagandized.
This. It's not fair to apply this rule that kinda says "state affiliated/funded = propaganda" to everyone except for USA media, that's some USA exceptionalism.
It does disclose it... this is at the end of the article:
Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. NPR's Bobby Allyn and Mary Yang contributed to this story. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
You're right. I either missed it or the disclaimer was added after I first read the piece.
I think I'd have preferred it be up front in the first paragraph, and that the writer used language making it clear he was talking about his own company and not NPR as an entity he was able to be objective about. That's what I'd have done.
I'm not sure what you meant about the language to use -- but I do agree that I'd prefer to see disclosures upfront. I know that most NPR podcasts, for example, state the disclosure at the start of the podcast. Because honestly, I probably only finish about half of the articles I start -- I know, that's my fault.
I mean by language some difference in words or voice. For example, instead of describing what NPR's chief executive did, the author could have written about what his boss did.
WBUR is an NPR station, not only is it not difficult to find out the writer is an employee of NPR, it's out in the open and advertised as such. Do writers need to disclose on every article that they're employees of the organization they're writing for?
I think they should make it clear in the first paragraph when they are, in effect, writing about themselves or their employer. That's what I would have done.
Seems like a funny reaction to a label added as a subtitle to an organization with the name National Public Radio
People get attached to words or phrases without thinking about what they actually mean, seems like definitions get modified to emotionally herd the [un]imaginative/initiated
Wild that style of thinking goes that high up the chain at NPR the CEO sounds child-like with their response
> outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution. [1]
This isn't an accurate description of NPR. The government has no control over the content.
> NPR receives less than 1% of its direct funding from the federal government [2]
Even Twitter recognized this and walked back the labeling. [3]
Twitter is in a precarious state with both advertisers and media folks like reporters. Advertisers are concerned that Elon Musk has a tendency to hurt brands by taking unpredictable, rash action. Reporters are concerned that Twitter is becoming increasingly political.
In a fit of conservative pique, Elon Musk took an umprompted pot shot at NPR by labeling it as "state-sponsored media," which fed heavily into both stories in a completely predictable way. Then he changed his screen name to "Harry Ballz."
I guess it depends on who you think the platform is designed for, I believe it is designed first and foremost for the users' and their experience which is not to say advertisers and media don't have a place but they should not be driving the direction of what is ultimately a design decision
Being surprised Elon is meming is is like being surprised [normal thing happens] while the CEO of NPR saying
"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,"
"I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
Has one semi-controversial decision against his org. and decides to pull everyone in that org. off it, especially a firm whose management is known for rapid iteration, as shown earlier today with f.ex. the BBC label being updated
However I do understand American's propensity for being sensitive to having any of their institutions having the same labels as the bad guys'
It's a direct attack on the reputation and credibility of the organization from a man-child. Musk is targeting certain orgs and people because "hurr durr lolz I'm funny!" He's a troll.
I'm so glad that NPR is leaving Twitter. Many more will come. The world will be a better place when that cesspool is no longer bubbling.
Current NPR CEO John Lansing used to be the CEO for USAGM which supervises Voice of America (VOA), Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe, etc.
He certainly figured it out, which is why he worked so hard to back out of the deal.
Though he never really expected it to earn its price back. As a large-fraction-of-a-trillion-aire, he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment. He was buying a chance to put a significant thumb on the finger of world culture.
Musk has so much money that he doesn't really care if there's a net positive return to his purchases. He spends money to enjoy it. Which I actually find bizarrely refreshing, compared to the ones who want to use it for the purpose of acquiring more money, plus the occasional conspicuous consumption that seems more like a performance than actual enjoyment (e.g. megayachts).
> he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment
This is the most disappointing part. I have a hard time imagining that any of these billionaires are "good people" in a way that I would recognize. But before this Twitter thing I felt like at least I can respect the things Musk chooses to spend his time and money on. How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream? Seems like a waste to me.
> How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream
It would make 0 difference, SpaceX is already moving as fast as possible, throwing money at them would not make things go faster. In the future when actual ships start flying to Mars Elon will still have plenty to fund that personally if he needed to.
In other news, the first flight test of the largest rocket ever built is scheduled for Monday the 17th
Forget about Mars, what about spending that $44B to lobby the government to end poverty for children in the US, feels like a noble cause. Senators and Congressmen/women are bribed, excuse me, lobbied, for peanuts (< millions).
For $44B, he could have just given every child $2,000. Not enough to end poverty, but surely enough to keep them fed for a year.
I realize that this isn't practical; the causes of poverty are complex and just giving people money won't solve all of it. But it does give some notion of the scope of what could have been accomplished directly.
But if you already have $100 billion dollars; and all you wanted in the world was adoration and accolades from adoring masses; and you didn't care those masses are trolls, clowns, and morons; then maybe $44 billion is the right price.
It really underscores how the Internet needs a notion of social networking that is based on open standards and open infrastructures. Imagine if it was 2002 and Bill Gates pulled a similar gambit and just "bought the web."
Fortunately that was actually impossible, but it underscores how a thing like Twitter is also too important to be a plaything of investors and playboys.
Every time someone mentions Mastodon here, we get a bunch of responders saying "they blew their chance" as if they're copy-pasting off of a script… I hate to be conspiracy-brained, but a quick note to those guys: if you are Twitter insiders, you're not being very subtle.
From where I'm sitting, Mastodon — and more importantly, ActivityPub — is doing great. For those that thing the standard is too weird for normies, keep in mind that the way things are going, more startups are going to follow Medium and Substack’s approach.
It's waaaaay better for those of us without an account. It loads every time, rather than failing about 2/3 of the time (at least on mobile—always figured that was some weird dark pattern to try to get me to use the app, did it to me consistently for years across multiple devices), and doesn't block me with a loginwall if I scroll too far before hitting "more replies" anymore.
All the drama around Twitter's also flat-out hilarious if one doesn't care whether Twitter lives or dies, and lots of that drama's on Twitter, so I'd call that an improvement, too.
Sometimes it wont show me current tweets. My timeline is full of accounts that I don't follow and nobody I follow replied. I had to block musk's account because it was the only thing I was seeing. Tweets disappear when I try to look at them. Its been frustrating to say the least.
I take it for what it is, a notification engine for "influencers" and media, and a time-waster, and basically nothing else
it's essentially not good for anything else, if you put too much faith in it to do things like learning or discovering new things, you're going to be disappointed
but at what it does I think it's better than a couple of years ago when I last spent some time using it - it was unmitigated garbage at everything back then
It's not, as long as you're not doing it to specifically target one company or be a dick about it. Is he going to label his own companies with the same thing?
>According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, Musk's companies had received an estimated $4.9 billion in government support by 2015, and they've gotten more since.[1]
Tesla, a government-funded company, has the ability to remotely disable your car. Surely they'd be happy to do this at the government's request, no? Locking your car mid-drive and rerouting you using FSD because you said something the government didn't like?
SpaceX, a government-funded company, has the ability to put all kinds of invasive, espionage-focused payloads into space.
The point is, if we're going to insinuate that NPR is doing the bidding of the US government simply because a portion (however large or small) of the money they receive comes from the government, then we can insinuate the same kind of sentiment towards Musk's companies.
If you think it's important to know that a media company takes government money, why wouldn't it be important to know if other companies in other industries are similarly connected?
Please act in good faith. You know why Twitter did what it did, and you know why it was wrong. We know you know that. NPR is not state affiliated, or even government funded. Fox news airs ads from the US Military - is it state affiliated?
Your logical fallacy is incredulity. What Twitter did was absolutely ethical, and since it applies to all government funded media, it is not political in nature. Yes anyone accepting government ad money should be labelled as well.
I'm not sure what ethical means in this context, or what it has to do with them being wrong. What responsibility does Twitter have to anyone? They are a privately held corporation. Where they were 'wrong' is in not being consistent in their labeling, and the subtext surrounding that - of which we are all aware but some of us (like you) are unwilling to acknowledge in order to advance an argument or to just Troll. But go on...
Because the "government funded media" was a last minute save, the original "state affiliated media" is a false claim. Surely you grasp the difference between the two labels? The latter has corporate and editorial control in case you were unaware.
Anyone providing money to a media org has some amount of editorial control. The newer version is more specific but it doesn’t mean state affiliated is inaccurate.
It does mean it's inaccurate because state affiliated is already a specific term to describe editorial control. I don't know how else to put it to you, maybe an example.
You can publish a podcast or article or whatever on NPR right now about how much you hate the current administration and want them replaced. You cannot do that with state affiliated media, if CGTN tomorrow did the same, the state has the direct ability to take action against that by firing people, changing management, altering funding, etc. That's if they even get past initial filters!
To argue that "state affiliation" is meaningless by handwaving it as "anyone providing money to a media org has some amount of editorial control" is bad faith.
Aren’t you assuming bad faith by claiming that Twitter is somehow conspiring against NPR by labelling the state sponsored media as being state sponsored?
It isn't. What's bad is that by singling NPR out for receiving less than 1% of their revenue from the government implies that's something unusual. It isn't. Almost every business receives money from the government.
Because "state-affiliated" specifically means the state has editorial control - which is certainly not the case here - not merely that they provide some funding.
They have not. You are relying on a false headline that calls things like contracts, loans, zev credits from other automaters as ' government subsidies', which is obviously incorrect.
Tesla is only just now receiving subsidies to produce batteries from the IRA that was passed last year, but previously had received no subsidies from the federal government
It feels like you’re attempting to make excuses for bad faith behavior through contortions of criteria. That is a choice, but not one I think that would stand up to scrutiny (based on the facts of the matter, Elon’s very public history of how he exists, operates, and “lashes out” whenever feeling challenged or sleighted).
> RT’s parent company, TV-Novosti, is registered as a state-owned Autonomous Non-commercial Organization (ANO) with the Russian Ministry of Justice. According to TV-Novosti’s official filings with the Ministry, it is almost entirely funded by the state budget, with the exact figure ranging annually between 99.5% and 99.9%.
That would depend entirely on the specific details, including that 99% funding number. If you wanna allege specifics about NPR beyond "they once hired someone who used to work for the government", go for it.
True but it does lean heavily in one political direction. If it is receiving any federal funding then it should be pushed to neutrality, and remove the one-sidedness of their news programing.
I think NPR would be very upset if the government required political neutrality as part of its funding.
NPR seems plenty neutral to me. Neutral is not defined as the midpoint between our two main US political parties (as your username would suggest you know).
I always hear more than one side to each story, when they're long enough, and a good mix of brief stories about either side, positive and negative.
I am a regular listener to at least Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and I can assure you their reporting is very biased to the Left.
The credulous reporting of politically left ideas, policies, and positions on news stories without even strawman explanations of competing ideas is very frequent.
I listen to podcasts for long form, fair discussions of issues, but NPR used to (seemed to?) hew to an objective ideal of reporting, and the new crew happily crusades for their team/goals.
Or maybe your perception of what is actually neutral is too skewed by American political extremism. It seems any source that isn’t ranting about trans folk and teachers being groomers or that the 2020 election was stolen is somehow “left leaning” to many people in this country.
When Trump threatened to cut their funding because they weren't friendly enough to him, their funding increased from donations quite a bit. They're making content their listeners want.
Not at all ragequitting and not degrading to NPR. Staying on the platform tacitly implies NPR accepts the label ...which would be degrading, from their perspective.
Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.
If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.
Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.
Both. Elon's approach to all this is pointlessly erratic, alienating himself from numerous people and orgs he could really use as allies. He might be right that moving entirely to paid verification is needed... but even if that is needed, it could be rolled out over a long time, with much less alienation of the user base.
NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.
asking NPR to be patient while elmu abuses and insults them is like asking an abused spouse to just stick around in case their abuser with a history of abuse & gaslighting suddenly and inexplicably cleans up their act
at the very least, twitter & elmu have to understand their actions were wrong and show conciliation for wronging them – if they're incapable of that bare minimum, there's obviously no hope of them cleaning up their act
Experiences seem to vary a lot. Some people report the Twitter feed changed radically for the worse. Others (including me) have found it's about the same. I think it must depend greatly on what accounts you follow.
McDonalds, a state funded eatery,... (because they accept tax breaks)
Amazon, a state funded company,... (because they shopped around for the best tax breaks)
Or any single other company that does what a company does by making any deal they can to better their bottom lines by taking tax breaks or gov't funding in any form would need to be called state funded.
This seems perfectly fair to me and I don't understand the controversy. Maybe in the US people see "State Affiliated" as some kind of an insult? Public broadcasters like the BBC and Al Jazeera have done extraordinary work at times.
That being said it would only be fair to also include a badge for private media corporations that says who their parent corporation is.
>This seems perfectly fair to me and I don't understand the controversy. Maybe in the US people see "State Affiliated" as some kind of an insult?
From Twitter's definition
> State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.
> State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled.
> State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.
I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and using only the most current one. Policies get updated over time and that's okay. It's a good thing for organizations to change their mind, update and improve policies.
The thing is here it's dumb no matter what version of the policy you look at lmao
Typically the State Affiliated badge is only applied to accounts where editorial control is in the hands of the state - think Chinese and Russian media companies.
Also interesting- after the change, NPR's badge says "Government-funded media" while the BBC's badge says "Publicly funded media," at least in the US. Al Jazeera does not have any such badge, other than the gold "Official Organization" badge.
Mostly because the amount of money we're talking about from NPR where including indirect funds (Government -> NPR Affliates -> NPR + Government -> NPR) reaches single digits whereas the majority of BBC funding comes from the TV license legislation enforced by the government and Al Jazeera has an undisclosed amount of money funding it.
Further a huge amount of media outlets worldwide receive money from the government in the realm of single digits and yet are not slapped with the same label, NPR is only being equated to organisations like the BBC here who are truly on a different level in terms of being "state affiliated".
NPR could very conceivably leave all of its government funding behind and not hurt all that much as a result. Whereas if BBC lost all the TV license funding it would be apocalyptic for the organisation. So regardless of the nominal independence of Al Jazeera and BBC from their respective governments, it's difficult to see them as being as independent in practice. NPR gets far more of its funding from corporate sponsors who in all likelihood have more of an editorial influence over it than the government does. They aren't however listed as "Corporate-affiliated media", which would honestly be both more accurate and more damning to their image. Whereas I really wouldn't claim that BBC or Al Jazeera are "Corporate affiliated media" but I wouldn't hesitate to call them "State affiliated".
Those don't technically come from the government, they come from other car manufacturers. Those car manufacturers could choose to make lower emission vehicles, but instead have chosen to pay Tesla to have Tesla's vehicles count towards their fleet average.
In the context of them posting to Twitter, the Tesla/SpaceX social media team posting links to conteny is not significantly different from an NPR social media team linking to content.
Twitter is serving as a marketing avenue for these companies; either as a value add to Twitter or for "free" because these teams are not clicking on ads.
As more organizations stop posting to Twitter AND Twitter continues to fail to find advertisers, Twitter will be a money and content hole.
My general take on this is that people can make whatever arguments they want about whether NPR is According-To-Hoyle state media (I don't think it is, by the spirit of the term, but it's a gnarly enough question that I wouldn't want to burn a whole thread trying to hash it out).
The real issue here is: if Twitter is going to continue to be ad-sponsored for commercial viability, running a social media platform that chases National Public Radio off is very bad for business. You already have major national brands hesitant to re-engage there (whether you like their reasons or not). Playing chicken with NPR and losing is an awfully powerful arrow to put in the anti-Twitter quiver at those companies.
I wouldn't want to look at this through the lens of politics, so much as just plain mismanagement. It's part of a broader theme of Twitter, which depends utterly on user-generated content, doing things to deliberately antagonize the minority of their user base that actually produces content people want to see.
State affiliated media indicates state run media... i.e. propaganda for the State. NPR is in no way propaganda for the State. It's probably the furthest a media outlet could be from such a thing. This as an example of people putting their own political ideologies above all else and labeling the things that don't necessarily support them as propaganda. It's wrong and short sighted.
GP can provide non-NPR examples over the last five years maybe and cross-corelate with any NPR coverage to prove their point? I disagree, this is moving goalposts.
GP asked for critical articles and received them. Changing the requirements to be for the last five years is moving the goalposts, by way of a no-true-scotsman.
Take it as you will, but the example they give is:
> For example, NPR joined with other media organizations to press the Obama administration for access to closed hearings involving detainees held by U.S. authorities at Guantanamo Bay
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) receives about half a billion dollars annually from Federal grants, and then channels that funding into subsidiaries like PBS and NPR.
Funding from a benefactor is known to create bias.
I'm concerned about NPR's statements which almost resembles some kind of pathology, because the statements look like a mix of denial and/or rationalisation. We are seeing outright denial, that they only get a little bit of federal funding... or rationalisation like that funding is just a small portion of our tiny budget...
The fact is that in 2021 Public Radio received about ~$100 Million, and about the same in 2022. If these estimation are wrong, they are leaning towards the conservative side, and would likely go higher. I'm pulling the data from the CPB financial statements, and mostly glossing over the details, yanking data from the executive summary.
Please, by all means dispute this data. I'd love to be persuaded that this is all somehow wrong. But right now it looks like NPR & PBS are both affiliated with the Federal government because they get significant funding from there, alongside donations.
I'm not going to dispute the data, but I don't think it means what you're saying it does. Honestly, I think you've made the same mistake that most people make in this conversation and equating NPR to Public Radio. NPR is Public Radio, but not all Public Radio is NPR.
TL;DR: Based on the document you linked to the lions share of the money goes to _public radio stations_ in unrestricted grants to pay for their operations. Of the money that does trickle through that to program providers, NPR is only one of dozens of program producers and distributors, and NPR's own reporting on this seems to accurately portray the reality of how they are funded from independent stations.
Looking at the second link you provided theses are the expenditure programs that look related to public radio broadcasting in the us: Radio Program Fund, National program production and acquisition grants, Community service grants, and Public broadcasting interconnection system. There may be expenses in other categories but they don't appear to be directly related to public radio.
According to that document, these programs are:
Radio Program Fund represents expenses for the development and production of high-quality, new and innovative radio programs that might not otherwise be supported by the marketplace.
National program production and acquisition grants are restricted grants made to qualified public radio stations that must be used for the production, acquisition, promotion or distribution of national radio programs that are of high quality, creative and reflect society’s diversity.
Community service grants are unrestricted general operating grants made to qualified public television and radio stations.
Public broadcasting interconnection system [...] a new interconnection system to be used by both public television and radio stations to transmit and receive programming feeds [... as well as] “other technologies and services that create infrastructure and efficiencies within the public media system.
The line item breakdowns on these services for 2022 are
Radio Program fund: 7,145,925
National program production and acquisition grants: 24,579,081
Radio community service grants: 72,446,561
Public broadcasting interconnection: 2,871,313
Total: 107,042,880
So it looks like the CPB spends slightly over 107M on _public radio_ in the united states.
Note that the "National program production and acquisition grants" specifically go to qualified public radio stations. NPR isn't a public radio station, and so doesn't directly get any of that money. That money would go to a local public radio station (here's a [list](https://radiostationusa.fm/formats/public)). A station like my own WMFE then would use that grant money to purchase a radio program like All Things Considered from NPR. But they might also use that money to purchase a radio program like Marketplace from APM, or This American Life from PRX, or be used to produce it's own programs like WBUR's Here and Now. So that money _might_ go back to NPR, but it might not.
The same thing applies to the Radio community service grants, they're unrestricted grants to _stations_ so NPR _might_ get some of that money but much of it probably go to pay local expenses, like the salaries of the radio engineers who keep the towers up and running.
What about the Radio Program fund? That looks like it's pretty much targeted to NPR. Certainly not 100% of it is going to NPR's new programming. Even being generous all de-funding this will do is specifically cut programs "that might not otherwise be supported by the marketplace". I suspect most of that money goes to things like The Splendid Table, and Growing Bolder (neither are NPR shows btw). Unless you want to argue with Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner that news isn't a marketable product?
The Public broadcasting interconnection is paid to _stations_ to make physically acquiring content easier and a deal with NPR, APM, PRI, PRX and others reduced that cost _significantly_, so that line item dropped to 2M in 2022 from 78M in 2021.
Nothing in your document I believe NPR _claims_ they get about 13% of that portion of a station's budget (based on [WMFE's 2021 Audit](https://drive.google.com/file/d/121U2UFSI8eNYUg59TnZtELEhBL-...) "program acquisition" was about 16% of their total budget so NPR seems credible here) … so about ~$12M of the CPB funding, add in a chunk of the Radio Program fund let's say 80% or ~$6M … we're still at about $18M of the $107M … plus another 1% direct funding (or is that 1% the Radio Program fund?) and we're around 20% of the total CPB "public radio" budget ends up in NPR. Since the CPB's "public radio" budget is only about 25% of the total expenses from the CPB … is 5% of the CPBs expenses considered "significant funding"?
De-funding "public radio" won't mean that Morning Edition goes off the air, it means that the farm report for Ida Grove, IA goes off the air … and the wildfire reports for Billings MT … and close to home for me it means that Brendan Byrne won't be able to keep doing Are We There Yet and reporting on the rockets that keep going up funding my local community with something _other_ than tourism.
The numbers aren't wrong, your definition of "public radio" is wrong when you assume it's just NPR.
How on earth can anyone say "falsely labeled"? NPR does get money from the federal government, that is an undisputable fact. How are they not "state-affilated"? I don't care how small a % of the budget is money from the government. The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.
Twitter's own definition of "state-affiliated media" reads as follows:
State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.
COMPETES act stuffed 500M for state sponsored anti-PRC propaganda. By that definition all US media should be default suspect of being state affliated. Or charitably state influenced / infiltrated.
If NPR was as upstanding as some think, and if this money isn't meaningful as claimed, then why is it so hard for NPR to give the money back and distance themselves in a way that leaves no room for question about being propaganda?
> In that case, very nearly every business (including mom and pop shops)
How so? In what capacity are “most businesses” getting federal money? Tax credits/breaks don’t count, that is the companies money that they don’t have to pay, not the federal government directly funding the business.
In their rebuttal [0] to this, they cited a statement from the White House Press Secretary:
> When asked about Twitter's decision during the White House's daily briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to address Twitter's content rules specifically. But she also defended NPR's journalism.
> "There is no doubt of the independence of NPR journalists," Jean-Pierre said. "If you've ever been on the receiving end of their questions, you know this."
If you read more [1] you'll see that NPR used several sources' talking points in its story.
So in this context who better? Also it's not like they received a real response from Twitter when they asked:
"In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks."
Great, so you agree that Tesla and SpaceX must also be labeled as state-affiliated, right? And of course every single company that took PPP money, and...
And what purpose would that serve? Tesla is not a media company. It doesn't publish news and it doesn't claim to be objective. Nobody is interested in how their sources of funding might bias their coverage of events because that's completely irrelevant to a car company
Okay, so when big media corps get cut deals by government, are they now state-affiliated? Is Disney state-affiliated, with no editorial independence, because Florida had granted them their own little kingdom? Your post might as well say: "I don't care what the facts are, my minds made up that NPR is a mouthpiece for the state." It's just not at all true. Stations pay for NPR content, and stations are member driven, despite subsidy. The federal government has no more say in NPRs content than anyone else's.
If every source was judged by that standard, and the accounts of media conglomerates such as Disney were also flagged as state affiliated, I could get on board with that, maybe. But it risks being a useless qualification at that point.
By this logic, Tesla is also "state-affiliated". A huge amount of companies in this country receive government subsidies, are they all "state-affiliated" media? The NPR journalists act independently from any government oversight, they are not part of the government's media apparatus
I think folks who don’t follow the media industry would be surprised how much federal money makes its way around. The U.S. military alone has an annual marketing budget over $400 million, most of which goes to media companies.
There is also the 2nd order effect of major government contractors who spend heavily on brand advertising, which is in turned funded by revenue from government contracts. NPR actually gets most of its “government funding” this way, as private membership dues from local radio stations (who themselves receive some federal grants).
Personally what matters to me is editorial independence from the government, not where single digits of revenue come from. And NPR is undeniably as editorially self-directed as any other media company.
> The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.
Let's leave out the Elno companies that take gov money hand over fist, why is this label not applied to every company that gets tax benefits, took out govt loans?
"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he says. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
Is NPR state funded? (real question - I actually don't know). What is the definition of state funded? Here in Canada all the media take government subsidies especially the big ones - a lot of that I think is the economics, they simply don't generate enough revenue on their own to sustain themselves so in the process of being subsidized by the federal govt they take on the viewpoint that can be considered statist. You just can't bite the hand that feeds you. The step that comes before independence of thoughts has to be independence of economics.
34% of their budget comes from CPB, which is federal funding for local radio stations, and which NPR gets the money through local stations. They downplay this funding source and only mention the 1-4% that they get directly from local/state/federal government sources but clearly NPR would be dead without federal funding.
>In its 2019 fiscal year, direct federal grants provided 0.6% of funding for National Public Radio... NPR does derive support indirectly, through payments from member stations that also get direct federal funding.
> NPR relies on the local stations' payments for 34% of its budget. CPB estimates its support provided 8.2% of the average station's budget in 2017, but it's more important to affiliates in smaller, rural markets
> NPR relies on the local stations' payments for 34% of its budget.
Local stations are not 100% government funded.
> CPB estimates its support provided 8.2% of the average station's budget in 2017, but it's more important to affiliates in smaller, rural markets.
If I do the math. An average station's budget is 8.2% from CPB, and 34% of the funding for NPR comes from local stations, taking that 8.2% of government money, and saying 8.2% of the 34% funding from local station it is 2.7% of NPR's budget from local stations. And 0.6% directly, so from _your source_ NPR is funded by 3.1% from CPB.
Here's Twitter's old definition of who is and isn't "state-affiliated". They have since changed it. Note that NPR was literally used as an example of someone who receives state funds but is not "state-affiliated".
"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
So is your argument that NPR is a mouthpiece for the US government? I think that requires some evidence, rather than flinging about flimsy associations like this.
"According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB; in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources."
"about 50% of NPR revenues come from the fees it charges member stations"
"In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities."
Well, there is an interesting history here. E.g. in 2000 NPR (and CNN) allowed the US Army's Psychological Operations division to place military members in the newsroom as interns as part of a media training program:
> "PSYOPS is a division of the U.S. Army mandated to “develop and disseminate propaganda designed to lower the morale” of “enemy forces,” and to “build support among the civil population” in other countries for U.S. objectives (U.S. Army Field Manual No. 100-15)."
I'm fairly certain that if a Russian media company had a history of hosting Russian military psyops people in its newsroom, or if hired ex-military and ex-intelligence officers as commentators, it'd get the 'state-affiliated' label on platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc. without any controversy.
"Cable Network News (CNN) and National Public Radio, (NPR) denied that the "psy-ops" officers influenced news coverage and said the internships had been stopped as soon as senior managers found out . For its part, the army said the programme was only intended to give young army media specialists some experience of how the news industry functioned."
That...seems like a pretty reasonable explanation?
Just to be clear, the alternative theory you have is that the US government wanted to influence NPR's coverage, and thought the best, most inconspicuous way to do so would be by using an intern placement program targeting Army media officers?
The point they’re making is the point they’re making. Take it exactly for what it is. If the same thing was reported to have happened In Russia, it wouldn’t be terribly controversial to label the media outlet “state-sponsored”.
It's insane to me that we're all just supposed to give a US army program literally titled PSYOPS the benefit of the doubt because their corporate partners said there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone remember that the entire mainstream media was in full support of everything the bush administration did in the middle east, NPR included?
I remember. I don't think it was because of some unpaid interns in the mail room or whatever.
I think this kind of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy theorizing trivializes the real, challenging, human issues of editorial independence, the complexity of fairly representing reality, etc, etc.
We must have very different trust levels in the military industrial complex then. I think it's worth pointing out this program happened in 2000. Do you think it just went away? Do you think that when obama legalized spreading propaganda in the US no one capitalized on it?
I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.
> I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.
I totally agree that an over-emphasis on "access" leads to inaccurate reporting. You're certainly right to tie that to the invasion of Iraq.
But I don't think there's any evidence that the US military is running domestic psyops, and certainly if they were doing so it would not be via unpaid internships.
Of course there are broader problems. A lack of trust in the media and a lack of attention span--no doubt driven by social media intermediation and a lack of accountability for individual publishers--reduces incentives to get stories correct, and increases incentives to get stories. A public that misunderstands the role of reporters thinks analysis equals bias and is obsessed with up-to-the-minute stories, and high production values--the latter of which can only be afforded in large metro and national markets, leading to a hollowing out of local content.
These aren't original observations, of course. But they are indeed real problems. I think they have very little to do with the prospect of Pentagon psyops, which, frankly, are unnecessary given the underlying structural flaws.
Several years after Nixon's resignation,[0] Carl Bernstein published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that over the course of 25 years, the CIA had tasked more than 400 journalists for special assignments, including Pulizer Prize winnders and a publisher for the New York Times.
"Some of these..relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services-from simple intelligence gather to serving as go-betweens."
I'd perhaps distinguish between 'state-sponsored' (i.e. all the operating funds come from a government) and 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)
If MSNBC hires a Biden spokesperson (Jen Psaki) or if CNN hires a intelligence officer (e.g. James Clapper) or if Fox hires a White House communications director (Hope Hicks), that's 'state-affiliated' in the same sense that if RT hired Putin's press secretary or some FSB/GU officer we'd say, 'oh, right, they're state-affiliated.'
News reports are more reliable if the people reporting on government activities are not themselves from the government, it's called an independent press and is generally held to be a critical component of democratic systems.
There’s another aspect you have to consider: the power dynamic. If MSNBC hired Jen Psaki or Fox News hired Hope Hicks because she got sick of working in government, they might have a bias towards their former colleagues but it would be voluntary and clearly a job either would be qualified for. That’s pretty different from, say, Russian government going to RT and giving them a list of qualified candidates or even, say, the Tories appointing their loyalists to the BBC because the decision isn’t being made by the government and there isn’t a threat explicit or implicit that there would be consequences for not hiring them.
Another power dynamic to consider is that MSNBC or FOX have owners (Comcast and Murdoch respectively) and those owners have shareholders (Blackrock, Fidelity etc.) who also have holdings in corporations that get their revenue from government contracts (Lockheed etc.) and so MSNBC executives feel pressure to hire employees who will generally take a positive view on the delivery of large government contracts to corporations, government-structured tax breaks and bailouts for corporations, and so on, and of course a government employee with an eye on possibly returning to a government career is an acceptable option, because they will promote the opinion that this is a great system that doesn't need say, more audits or investigation into misappropriation of public funds and so on.
Now the word for this kind of integration of the corporate world and the government world is....?
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini
Yes, that's mostly true. In terms of the tendency of government regulators to have been ex-corporate middle managers, this is called 'the revolving door'.
Isn't it interesting that a few months ago a few people in twitter spaces were shouting to the world that twitter ITSELF had backchannels to govt and payments and thus was also state affiliated media? What about that?
For what it's worth, I'll give some perspective here as a career Army officer.
I think this is one of those things that sounds like the plausible work of a highly intelligent and effective monolith, which is how conspiracy theorists often seem to view "the government." I think the reality is that "the government" and the US Army is not. It's a sprawling bureaucracy with insanely high turnover and many internal divisions, in which every sub-organization has its own goals, and people are operating independently at every level of those sub-organizations (and mostly to advance their personal career goals which are often quite limited, like making it to a 20-year active duty retirement or 30-year FERS civilian retirement, getting an education, and transitioning to a good job in the private sector as soon as possible).
2000 was before my time, but this sounds like a program which still exists called "Training With Industry." The ideas behind TWI are that: (1) The Army has people in uniform who've been working hard and doing good things, feeling burned out, and are on the fence about whether they should continue in uniform or find another career path. (2) The Army would like to retain their valuable experience and expertise. (3) Letting people do an internship in private industry for a year, trying out "civilian life," on the condition that they do three more years in uniform afterwards, might be a win-win. It gives people a break and something nice to put on their resume for later. They learn and experience some things from the internship that the Army can't teach. It's like offering a sabbatical more than anything else. The Army lets people go to civilian graduate school for a year or two for the same reasons. My main point is that it's very divorced from the operational side of the Army, even though it's placing people in companies or graduate school programs that relate to their operational career fields.
Your arguments are cogent, but it's still 'state-affiliated media' - I mean, that also applies to the whole 'media embedding program' that got started in Desert Storm (Gulf War I, or perhaps II if we count the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s).
Independent media is not necessarily adversarial to government, but it can't be dependent on government or it turns into nothing but the propaganda arm of the government. E.g. reporting on military failures is necessary, even if this upsets the brass because it damages morale.
I think the embedded media program is much more problematic than TWI. Embedded media is at the invitation and discretion of operational public affairs officers and commanders, and those public affairs officers and commanders absolutely have operational "themes" and "messages" that they want to have broadcasted. I just finished Michael Hastings' book The Operators and he describes in-depth the dilemma for a reporter.
But TWI is run by human resources wonks, and mostly for the benefit of the individuals participating. Frankly, it's disparaged by a lot of operational commanders who think those individuals should be serving in the mud somewhere instead of padding their personal resumes. I will concede, however, that there is a certain level of coziness between the Army and the companies that take TWI participants. In the IT community, for example, the Army buys a lot of stuff from Microsoft and Cisco, and Microsoft and Cisco host TWI participants. It makes sense in terms of the Army and those companies wanting to learn more about each other.
Please, in Soviet Russia interns tell you what to do. (I'm sorry, that was a terrible Yakov Smirnoff reference, I apologize to him and to anyone reading this.)
Anyway, in the USA military interns at NPR are learning how to run a radio station or whatever. I mean, if the military tried to tell NPR what to say there would be howls from coast to coast.
- - - -
And now I have read the article you linked to, and it does sound like there may have been some influence from OPD to NPR. As I would expect, when this came to light, there was howling from coast to coast, and it got shut down right quick. In fact, the article says the whole OPD was shut down. Good. (WTF people?)
"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he says. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
So much of this article reads like an op-ed that I can't take it seriously.
Edit: for the downvoters, some excerpts:
> The BBC exchange showed Musk as alternately conciliatory and erratic.
According to whom?
> He also said that he's sleeping on a couch at work, that he followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter only because a judge forced him to, and that he should stop tweeting after 3 a.m.
this is a lot to say without any specific quotes
> Like so many policy decisions at the social network of late, Musk applied the label to NPR's Twitter account abruptly. It's still not clear why he became so animated about the issue.
Heavy use of adverbs and adjectives is like injecting opinion.
> For years, many journalists considered Twitter critical to monitoring news developments, to connect with people at major events and with authoritative sources, and to share their coverage. Musk's often hastily announced policy changes have undermined that.
Unlike Twitter that is still selective on labeling. YouTube pretty much label every public media, that includes DW, BBC, and also NPR. Why do the stake seems much higher on Twitter? I'm thinking that's because journos, blobs and think tankers personally hang out on Twitter unlike YouTube.
Headline is incorrect. NPR’s label at the time of their departure was “government-funded media”. Changed after Musk conceded he got it wrong with the first label “State affiliated media”.
I strongly disagree with the notion that Elon Musk's labeling of NPR as 'state-affiliated' was an innocent mistake. In my opinion, Musk was well aware of the implications of lumping NPR together with propaganda outlets like RT and Xinhua. By doing so, he deliberately misrepresented NPR's journalistic integrity and reputation as a non-partisan news source. It's clear that NPR's objection was not to being labeled 'government-funded,' but rather to being unfairly associated with disreputable media organizations. This was a calculated move by Musk to undermine NPR's credibility and independence.
Imagine an upgraded version of Musk - making some of these changes in a less contentious way.
I find the idea of labeling media outlets quite helpful. The initial state-affiliated label for NPR seemed like an unnecessary tarnishment. The updated "government-funded" label is better, but still not quite there. The idea elsewhere in this thread of labeling the approximate percentage of government funding is excellent and should not be offensive to anyone involved.
>NPR's analytics show that less than 2% of our traffic comes from Twitter. It's not a surprise to people who work in media, but even before the labeling saga, there was a pretty strong business case that the game wasn't worth the candle
I read/listen to NPR daily. Twitter is blocked at my router. My very tech savvy family hasn't even mentioned the block once. Making good choices Mom...
Thats not necessarily true if its the weather service, post office or whatever. I am no Twitter fan/user, but its a decent format for circulating government announcements that people will actually see.
The argument is that its fair to label NPR as govt funded, because they technically are, but Twitter is not exactly in a hurry to apply this rule anywhere else.
What's sad is that people just automatically assume every government is altruistic when history has proven that to be unequivocally false. There is not ONE government in history that hasn't committed disgusting atrocities against its people.
When you realize that, it becomes clearly easy to see that you ought not put full trust media that is backed by government when every government has used media like this to push evil propaganda on to its citizens.
> citing the social media platform's decision to label NPR "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
it's indeed a shame they do it for chinese and russian companies, but not the BBC or western european broadcasters...
hell, not even Radio Free Europe is marked as "state-affiliated media". If not them, who?
Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such, which has been revised since, but is still archived.
"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
> Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such
> "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
That explains the what, not the why. It says they aren't going to consider BBC and NPR as state-affiliated, but not why they aren't going to consider them as state-affiliated. "Editorial independence" is a meaningless superlative that cannot be empirically measured through any means available to twitter.
The "why" is because the "state affiliated" label was meant to be innuendo for "untrustworthy" and twitter, under previous management, did not consider NPR and BBC untrustworthy.
I think it explains the why quite clearly- editorial independence. It's a big deal. NPR is allowed to be critical of the US government in a way that RT is not.
Have you ever considered the possible difference between what's officially allowed and what's actually happening?
Nowadays, when information is abundant, individual stories don't matter all that much; what does matter is building the overall narrative. Allowing critical stories doesn't affect that.
I agree that it was ineffective, that's why I think you should put that link in your bio- I don't think nearly as many people would waste much time talking to you if they were just linked to why you were banned instead of only seeing your biased version of it.
omg yes, between banks bailouts, law mandated insurances, private-pensions plans and companies with a huge public contribution (such as SpaceX); it would finally open the eyes to the public how much of "capitalism" is in fact politically created and directed.
Agreed! I also would love to see the flip-side and have congressional reps wear logos like in NASCAR. Let's be real fucking clear how many are solidly in the pocket of their corporate "donors".
you are asserting that having ever worked with the government necessarily means that you are silently, privately doing their editorial bidding on their behalf and I do not think that is reasonable or appropriate
Does anyone still use Twitter? I tried to delete my account a couple years ago (well before people complained of post-musk problems) and couldn't do it.
Not tweeting gives me time to make the award-winning comments [*] I'm known for on this platform.
But seriously, what are people using after leaving Twitter? I just quit social media sites, didn't go anywhere else.
I'm Danish and I may have a different take on this than many Americans, but I'm frankly a little appalled that our democratic institutions are still renting their digital homes on the turf of tech giants. The EU set a good example when Elon musk bought Twitter and the EU created their first Mastodon servers, both for it's organizations and it's elected officials, and everyone should frankly follow suit. We shouldn't accept that a billionaire gets to dictate the online content of our democratic institutions, and, especially not when there are easily available alternatives where you can take back the governance. At least that is my opinion on the matter and I hope Elon manages to make this happen by getting people to quit Twitter.
I'm not sure how it is around the world, because I mostly follow our local news on these topics, but it's been sort of silly to watch the Danish debate about TikTok. We've banned public officials from having it on their phones, but we've not banned Twitter, Facebook or any of the other Social Medias that do the exact same things TikTok does. Yes, we're allied with the US, but it's still sort of silly isn't it?. If the NPR is a state affiliated media because it gets public funding, then our primary media institution Danmarks Radio should frankly get the same label since it gets all of it's funding from the public. But why on earth wouldn't our primary media institution not run their own Mastodon server, so they can govern and moderate their own public image instead of being on Twitter? Sure they might lose followers, but we don't pay them public money to be popular on an American Social Media, do we?
Heh. I personally think that what I've said here applies to everyone, every institution and organisation but I can see why it's different for American organisations to be on an American Social Network, but really, isn't it time we took ownership of our online lives back?
I'm Danish and I may have a different take on this than many Americans, but I'm frankly a little appalled that our democratic institutions are still renting their digital homes on the turf of tech giants
They do this because our federal government is absolutely incapable of doing it themselves. Any tech project (hell, any massive project in general) they undertake goes massively over-budget/over-schedule and is loaded with subcontractor after subcontractor circling overhead like vultures trying to get their piece of the pie. It's why no government at any level is capable of delivering a public works project anymore. It's why so many have so little faith in our governments. No one cares about the end results, they just want to know how they can benefit personally from it and then fuck off
I think you misunderstand. You can't join the EU servers unless you're an elected official. You can make your own server, or join another one, but not the ones run by the EU. The beauty of the decentralized platform is that neither Brussels bureaucrats or billionaires get to decide what you do. I want the government of Denmark to run a similar server for our elected officials. That way Danish politicians get to decide how Danish politicians are moderated, which isn't the case today.
I listen to NPR station in the car. Anecdotally, very little of the content is true journalism; much of it is effectively op-ed. That's not necessarily a bad thing, provived you understand what you're consuming.
The state-funded tag is a bit much. But to claim NPR is a pure journalism play isn't accurate either.
My dad used to listen to NPR all the time growing up (WAMU). It was always liberal, but now it’s become this highly processed and refined sort of white sugar liberal that’s hard to stomach even for him.
Happy music and happy words when "preferred" people/ideas are the focus of the story. Sad music and choice words when "bad"/ideas people are the focus of the story.
"NPR is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public. Every day, NPR connects with millions of Americans on the air, online, and in person to explore the news, ideas, and what it means to be human. Through its network of member stations, NPR makes local stories national, national stories local, and global stories personal."
I think in their statement about leaving Twitter he mentioned journalism. I was pointing out that - imho - it's mostly op-ed. Nothing wrong with op-ed but it should never be confused with journalism.
> very little of the content is true journalism; much of it is effectively op-ed
What is your alternative for a true journalism / non op-ed radio news station?
Other than some tech sites and link aggregators / discussion forums (hello hackernews), I limit my news-reading to the AP and Reuters sites. But I’d be interested in learning about radio-based news sources, provided that they’re either accessible in my area or online.
The problem with NPR right now is that good content and content creators get snatched up immediately by bigger organizations once they gain any traction at NPR.
Joshua Johnson and his show 1A was the main case of this for me. The guy was running a top-notch show before NBC yoinked him up to the big leagues.
By definition they're state funded, but not state ran. The implications from the optics though may result in extreme takes. Though we could assume there's at least some influence the funding has.
Exxon gets a larger percentage of its income from the federal government in subsidies, yet we seldom (if ever) apply "government funded" to that organization.
I'm saying that technically, yes, they are receiving state funds, regardless of amount, and if the label is going to be applied then it should be applied to all company accounts receiving government subsidies, Exxon and others included.
My stance is that if twitter, youtube, and the likes are going to be using these labels on accounts, then they should apply them to all organizations universally without bias/singling out of individual industries. Either apply across the board going by a technical definition, or don't apply them at all.
NPR is not meaningfully state funded. They get less than 1% of their funding directly from the government. Local NPR affiliates get more, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. On average about 1/3 of their funding comes from the government, and a portion of that goes to NPR in the form of licensing fees for their programming.
In the end, erring on the side of overestimating the amount of government money going to NPR, it appears to be less than 10%. That is substantially less than a whole lot of other companies get, and those companies aren't considered "government sponsored".
I was going by technicality, but am aware of those numbers and agree. Also, it's my belief that it should be applied to all companies receiving government funds, or shouldn't be applied at all.
My comment clearly states "by definition". I'm going by the technicality, though I do agree with you that if there was any sway at all due to this funding, it's been minimal and did not reflect in the previous presidency.
Well they literally are, and combined with being as biased and disingenuous as any MSM organization out there, they should be labeled as such. Twitter has become much better since Musk took the helm. The little people can finally speak truth to power without getting deplatformed.
> And he confirmed Twitter will change its newly added label for the BBC's account from "government funded media" to say it is "publicly funded" instead.
Ninja editing this stuff is par for the course at Twitter, as are impromptu decisions, reversals of those decisions and reversals of the reversals. If you want to keep track of stuff you need to screenshot and timestamp it.
Most western countries have media comparable to NPR. In the UK that would be BBC, in Italy there is Rai, in Spain RTVE, in Portugal RTP and in Germany there is ARD. That makes me believe that they warrant their own label.
The BBC isn't comparable to NPR. The Chairman of the BBC is appointed by the UK's King-in-Council, on the advice of the Secretary of State. Similarly, RAI is owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance; RTVE is state owned. Not sure on RTP and ARD; they sound more NPR-ish from their Wikipedias, although ARD appears to be paid for by a mandatory license fee like the BBC is.
That is a bit my point. The details differ and the naming differs but I'd argue that by and large and in the broad public perception there are three categories: Privately-owned commercial, state controlled and a third category that is really neither. Regardless of the details and legalities people know it when they see it, so an own label
would be justified.
BBC clearly meets certain definitions of "state controlled" and NPR does not meet any. BBC itself cannot sack its chairman. Only the government can appoint and remove them.
> BBC clearly meets certain definitions of "state controlled".
I disagree with that. Every media is under pressure of influencing forces and sometimes mistakes are made, but throwing out the baby with the bath water and classifying the BBC as "state controlled" is clearly unjustified.
There is significant controversy on the current one , how his appointment came about and links to then PM Boris Johnson.
Also recent controversy over Match of the day program presenter Gary Lineker on twitter(!) comparing government language on immigration to the ones used by Nazis and his suspension following that .
Given all this it is fair to say they are government controlled
I've long thought that a service like Twitter is a public utility and should be run in a democratic way with government funding. The tragedy of Twitter only confirms that. I hope that a billionaire creates a Twitter clone and grants oversight to it to a democratically elected government body. I don't think it should have ads, because that would give advertisers influence. I think we should all fund it so we the public and have a public square for discussion that is neutral. We can all debate what kind of speech that we allow and vote on that
I'd support the Federal Government nationalizing Twitter. We live in a time of war after all, mostly cold fought on a cyber and informational front, but just as serious just the same. Musk has suppressed support of Ukraine on Twitter and boosted Russia supporting accounts. I think that's just wrong. I think it's obvious by now Musk can't be trusted.
Only state-affiliated media from countries we don't like, such as China and Russia, should be considered state-affiliated media. BBC and NPR get a pass. [/irony]
Each of these announcements shifts the window of discourse[1]. Not too long ago, the idea that a major news organization would leave Twitter was almost unthinkable. Now its just one of many departures and even more are on the fence.
It's also a great opportunity for networks like Mastodon to pick up steam and mindshare.
Since only about 25% of the US population pays any attention to Twitter, I think that you're correct -- the average person won't notice NPR's tweets are missing.
This was pretty much the aim; occupy the territory and drive others out. The goal isn't for Twitter (or X) to make money, as such, but to have a monopoly on real-time mass communication and leverage that monopoly to pick which content 'wins'. All the complaints about Twitter and other big tech companies are essentially a to-do list of what will happen following their capture or neutralization.
Distilled down to its most basic argument -the question becomes: can an institution that receives funding from a sponsor also claim that its output is independent of that sponsor's interests?
My perception is that NPR serves specific class interests, not State interests per se. Unfortunately for them, the State also serves the same narrow class interests. Rage-quitting will not address the underlying tension.
And whether it's unpopular or not, CPB gets federal and state grants for part of their operating budgets . Technically state funded or affiliated in the same way auto makers get government contracts.
I don't know why they are mad about the designation. Whether it implies bias or not, it's true they get state funds, ergo they are state funded media.
The issue is that they are marked as state affiliated, not state funded.
And i support every company that receive state funds, directly or via tax breaks to be called 'state funded company'. That would have interesting repercussions.
Wait wasn't the whole debacle that Twitter had special access to govt and received money for them regarding postings? Isn't twitter then also state affiliated media?
Does this marking only apply to US media or media active in the US?
Swiss public broadcasting such as @SRF is publicly funden but lack suck label. However you would have a very hard time finding someone in Switzerland that does not know this as there is constant debating about the fee which almost everyone has to pay separately from taxes.
NPR is indeed a propaganda machine. But only for one party, and its woke ideology. It doesn't even have to receive federal funding to acknowledge that. Now the technical question is what label do you put on a media platform that's captured by an ideology favorable to a single party which comes to power every few years?
> Now the technical question is what label do you put on a media platform that's captured by an ideology favorable to a single party which comes to power every few years?
Without agreeing that that is actually true of NPR, the most accurate label would be “typical private media”, virtually all of which has an ideological viewpoint shaped by the interests (commercial and/or otherwise) of its principals (and, often by way of those commercial interests, those of its sponsors.)
It is, since 2015-2016 its just awful. I used to love NPR, listening to is everyday in the 2000s and first half of 2010s, love the podcasts. SOMETHING happened, and it took a whole year or so for almost everything to be focused on politics and race and trump and I just completely lost interest.
I've been uncomfortable with the uneven application of those labels. I think they are a good idea and should be applied to all government sponsored media. It should be basic transparency, instead of a selective scary warning.
It's too bad we don't get a real experiment in trying to run a social network like Twitter on a skeleton crew. It would have been interesting to see the impact of sane moderation rules, but on 75% staff reduction.
To be fair they are, independent investigations have found around 20-40% of NPR's money comes from the US government in one form or another. I agree it's a bit ambiguous where the cutoff should lie though
Twitter will probably, eventually find a more appropriate label for high-quality public media sources, and NPR will probably find their way back, since it doesn't cost them anything. On the other hand, the current kerfuffle just scratches the surface of their current labeling approach's weirdness.
Propublica's twitter page is labelled "Media and News Company," but that's a label they applied to themselves, not something Twitter applies. Okay, fair enough. Some other for-profit or nonprofit news organizations don't have any labels at all, so clearly it's not mandatory. The distinction between something like Propublica and something like The Washington Post is significant to someone who cares about news, but maybe not to Twitter's censors.
Voice of America is still on there and is, reasonably, labelled "government-funded media." But BBC is not not labelled at all, with any label, because... Elon Musk liked their reporter? Or something?
NPR lost the influence that it once had on Twitter, controlling narrative that suited their political ideology. So, it quit. That's great new for Twitter.
NPR is far worse than a state-affiliated media. Its coverage during the riots and protests following the accidental murder of George Floyd focused on "racially disproportionate policing". It wasn't journalism. It was BLM protest using NPR as a microphone. There wasn't a single show that discussed crime statistics. Policing methods were discussed to the extent that it suited the narrative that cops in America are a racist militant group.
> Steve Inskeep (NPR): John Lansing, NPR CEO, at the @MorningEdition meeting.
> NPR says it will de-emphasize Twitter. Aside from the misleading label, NPR says Twitter isn’t used by most Americans; drives little traffic to NPR; and “no longer has the public service relevance that it once had.”
> Abby D. Phillip (CNN) replying to morning edition meeting: At the news org level, this makes sense. And even at the reporter level, we’d all be better served spending less time on here, because the conversations happening here are increasingly divorced from what’s happening in the real world.
> Steve Inskeep (NPR) replying to Abby: This captures something real. While I am not stepping away at this time (I read all sorts of sources!), Twitter always encouraged groupthink; has never captured the full range of what’s going on; and is a less valuable resource than a year ago. I’ve been on here less.
This is how I get my news. Not every news source has an Atom or RSS feed, but plenty of aggregating sites (like HN I might note) do have feeds. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this now. But apparently, this is not how the masses want to consume media, including news media.
That would indicate many high-quality news outlets.
Many European countries have state-funded but independent media.
Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, France, et al, all have state-funded and independent media.
The idea is that state-funding makes them less dependent since they do not have to only report what people want to read for ad-revenue but can focus on honest reporting (including reporting critical of the government).
Whether you buy that argument or not is a different discussion. The point is that "state funded" has nothing to do with "state controlled" or even "state affiliated"; just another dumb move by Elon Musk.
I quit Twitter a long time ago. Good riddance, I have not missed anything!
relating to a nation; common to or characteristic of a whole nation: this policy may have been in the national interest | a national newspaper.
• owned, controlled, or financially supported by the federal government: plans for a national art library.
There's a reason they don't. Much harder to trick people into donating to you if the algorithm on a large private social media site isn't around to prop you up.
There’s a lot of focus in comments on the funding. But let’s say you are an engineer at Meta. And the next time you log into Twitter, your personal Twitter account has a label that says “Meta-affiliated account.” Would that seem fair or accurate?
Even though you get most of your personal income from your employer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are directing what you do and say on your own social media accounts. Unless you are communicating in some professional capacity on behalf of your employer, like PR.
It’s similar with the concept of “state-affiliated media” (a concept which predates Twitter, by the way). The deciding factor is how much the media operation is doing, essentially, the PR work of the government.
Maybe with Biden in office, some poorly-informed conservatives would be willing to believe NPR is taking direction from the government. But during the Trump presidency? It’s obvious from even a cursory review of NPR content over the years that they are frequently at odds with the contemporaneous administration. Whereas state-affiliated media always is aligned, by definition.
> But let’s say you are an engineer at Meta. And the next time you log into Twitter, your personal Twitter account has a label that says “Meta-affiliated account.” Would that seem fair or accurate?
It seems reasonable to disclose that one works at a company before posting an opinion related to that company online. The statement "I love CeraVe products" is worth a whole lot more from a happy customer than it would be from a CeraVe employee.
But NPR is state-affiliated media. It was founded by the LBJ administration. And has always towed the government line with very little deviation from state-approved positions. Even the calls are heavily screened to not let anything remotely out of the box in.
SpaceX has taken massively more US gov funding than NPR. and many Tesla car buyers were persuaded to make the leap due to US gov tax incentives on EVs
I do miss the old Elon Musk, the one I could respect and appreciate without reservation. feels like something "broke" in his personality a few years ago
A criticism of NPR that I often see online is that NPR is leftists' propaganda machine (not government's, mind you, but democrat's). However, is this criticism true, though? To me, a propaganda machine would lie or weave facts to paint false pictures. I think it's perfectly okay if a media is either left leaning or right leaning. Heck, it's even okay if a media is extreme left biased or right biased, as long as the media reports facts (I assume opinions are their own rights). The only example I saw recently was that NPR blatantly rejected the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden's laptop story. I don't agree with NPR's decision, but I can definitely give them the benefit of doubt that they truly believed that the story was a distraction. So, are there any additional data points that show NPR is a propaganda machine to some extent?
> a propaganda machine would lie or weave facts to paint false pictures
A simple propaganda machine would. A sophisticated propaganda machine wouldn't want to be seen as a propaganda machine and wouldn't go off the rails, but just significantly lean on all topics and reports and massage the truth enough to make an impact, but not so much to derail the train.
No clue whether that's true for NPR, I think I've only ever seen something from them when I randomly discovered Kishi Bashi because he did an NPR concert that I enjoyed. But I don't think it's useful to say "you've either completely left reality whenever it comes to topics concerning your agenda or you're not a propaganda machine". Like, if I have a pair of dices that I can control, I won't just hit the best throw each time, because it won't last. I'll make much more money if I just make sure I win 60% of the time.
Episode 3 (trans dinosaurs) and the follow up are one good example.
But honestly, just turn on your station and listen. Unless you're so far left you can't tell the difference, it should be pretty obvious - although it was even worse when Trump was president.
Musk (and Trump) are really, really good at vocally saying things everyone agrees with to cover the fact they're doing the exact opposite. They're populist champions to such a degree that their supporters (and even the media / independents) can't fathom they don't actually care at all.
Free speech, no wars, anti-corruption in DC, etc. These are all things most people agree with. If some of the stuff Trump/Elon did secretly leaked, people would be going crazy. But they've mastered the art of publicly being hypocrites, to the degree that the average person just genuinely can't wrap their heads around.
Like, how can Elon publish "The Twitter Files" and then literally just do way worst stuff with way less accountability, and have people still believe he's a champion for free speech?
Like I said, they don't do secret stuff. People associate shame with having done something bad, and their in-the-open shamelessness is what breaks people's mental models of how to evaluate them.
There's a difference. I have a hard time thinking of anyone (other than Bernie) on the left who has followers in the same way as Trump or Elon. It's a very new (yet not new at all) type of cult of personality.
Not sure NPR's track record of this, but other news outlets labelling anything they didn't approve as misinformation, and calling out any affiliations for outlets they don't approve with abandon, now go: "It's not OK when others do it to us".
>The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.
Notice the BS reporting wording, because of course Musk did it, it couldn't be that Twitter employees did the labelling for thousands of outlets, including NPR.
They even managed to write about how Musk "allowed that he might have gotten it wrong" in a negative light.
So, "state-affiliated" is a bad thing, unlike those "by appointment to HM the Queen" that used to grace the advertisements of British (and other) brands?
HN has become so contrarian that it’s now the establishment well rooted in postmodernism and authoritarian tendencies to ensure society agrees with them.
It's not a social network. It's a way to follow reporters/news organizations/topics, and see what they post. No misinfo, no spam, no hate speech. Just news.
I think after COVID and all the revelations since then it is pretty clear that funding aside, every big media outlet bends over to their own government when they are being asked to push a certain narrative to the population in order to make us belief or behave in certain ways.
COVID made this extremely blatantly obvious but it was already apparent before COVID. For instance, when the US and its allies wanted to invade Iraq all big media corporations were peddling misinformation and propaganda to get people swayed in favour of an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation over false claims of weapons of mass destruction.
You might like "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
I know it's cliche to say but I started reading this recently and it is amazing how well it applies to the media today. I can't wait for it to be designated a conspiracy theory!
Riiiiight? Imagine reading that at an impressionable age before the Internet was a thing.
To me, most of the craziness we're seeing now seems like a variation on "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?":
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that soldiers would not want to return to their family farms after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
...as the masses come out from under the influence of mainstream media. People don't know what to believe and many of them have not had the training and education in rhetoric and logic to be able to effectively navigate the weirdness of the real world.
This comment doesn't hold up when you consider the person in charge of running the US government in 2020 was adamantly against any kind of COVID-19 prevention measures.
That person was also a disorganized, ineffective baffoon on a good day with a staff more interested in court intrigues than governing. That massive government institutions operated outside of his will shouldn't be surprising.
CPB indirectly funds NPR. Direct funding from CPB is ~1%, the rest comes from member dues of local broadcast stations that get their own funding. NPR doesn't control where the member stations get their funding from, and the US Gov't doesn't have editorial control over NPR.
Heck, Twitter itself used to make the distinction between state-funded without editorial control and state-affiliated (where the state has editorial control) on their own Help Center [1].
They removed the distinction on 2023-04-07 [2], two days after it slapped the state-affiliated label on NPR. That distinction had been in place for over two years
Yeah, it's not like their CEO came directly from the relevant government bureau, right?
I'm not a fan of Elon (or most companies, for that matter), but this was the right thing to do. Previously the "government-sponsored" badge was nothing more than US propaganda.
There’s a bit of a “Pluto problem” [1] though with labeling NPR and not explicitly government supported media organizations like Voice of America. This suggests to me that the decision was based on some personal beef the owner has with NPR and not any kind of objective basis.
It currently says "Publicly funded media", not "Government-funded Media", and that muddies the waters a bit - publicly-funded doesn't necessarily mean government-funded.
Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not, as the other person who replied to you suggests that changes to these statements appear to be pretty fluid at the moment.
"Publicly funded media" seems like a decent way of characterizing NPR. At some point one might question what Twitter and its users are getting out of all this labeling and relabeling, though. How many users are going to have an I had no idea NPR was publicly funded media but now I know epiphany when encountering that label?
> Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not
I am pretty sure all the observations made on labels in this thread were accurate at the moment they were made.
It was there yesterday from what I recall. However, there are like 10 variant official accounts of BBC. Only one had the label at first. Similar to how NPR has multiple accounts but only the "main" one had the label. Twitter should be more consistent in labeling all accounts under a company if this is the new policy.
The BBBC is funded by TV license fees so their funding is more arms length, also they make money through BBC Worldwide and collaborations with external media companies like HBO. As such they commonly shit on the government of the day, no matter who it is
I don't know how you'd apply measurement using the length of arms and conclude that BBC receives less money than NPR from the government. In any case, editorial influence is a lot more important, and that's where the BBC is falling down lately.
Oh, definitely; it could be based on literally anything, or just effectively random. But it doesn't change my view of whether the outcome is positive or not.
SpaceX and Telsa are government funded ... More so than NPR. I don't see that tag anywhere on Twitter. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitter is combing the tax code to find government subsidies. It's the slippery slope fallacy. Maybe we should start calling jaywalkers un-convicted criminals. It'd be a good way to differentiate rural and urban people for political gain. This is just another way to keep people heading to twitter for some extra clicks.
Every large corporation benefits or has in the past benefited from the government. What difference does it make? Business profiles do marketing and advertising. They're not expected to report neutrally and fairly about current goings-on in society and politics. This is a ridiculous argument that has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
it is very frustrating to see this openly disingenuous argument made repeatedly here in these comments.
media corporations are different from other corporations in that their product is information, as opposed to other types of services or physical goods. information is something that can be biased, politically or otherwise. this does not apply to automobiles, spacecraft, or any other non-information-related product. the release of an electric automobile cannot influence anyone's view, opinion, or emotions, with regards to anything except the existence of said electric automobile.
The mismatch is that it's disingenuous to apply the label in the US, while not applying it to NBC, ABC, Fox, NYT, WaPo, Sinclair, etc. The US has a microkernel government where most actual power resides with corporations, with the same investors and executives owning the major news sources and shaping their coverage. Ironically, "government funded" NPR and PBS are in many ways actually more independent of the governing power structure. There's a similar blindspot where US culture readily condemns foreign governments with singular dominant parties, while letting our own two party oligopoly (in alignment on most policies) go essentially uncritiqued.
(full disclosure: I'm unable to listen to NPR without falling asleep. That's not meant to be some sort of knock, rather it's just what happens)
He curiously missed Al Jazeera, RFE/RL, and the dozens of media organizations that the NED subsidizes. I don't think there's a conspiracy or anything, I just think he has a grudge against a handful of media companies.
I wouldn't exactly call the USAGM the "relevant government bureau". Their purpose is to push US-biased news and media outside of the US. I see your point, and it's a bit iffy, but I'd rather judge on actions than reputation.
VOA is also labelled as "government funded", which implies less editorial control but personally sounds worse than affliated. The labelling is all over place.
they should add a "government-sponsored" badge to the spacex twitter account. and maybe even starlink and telsa (assuming they have government subsidies or their consumers are using tax credits to buy EV or rural internet)
Would be slick if all the space-company accounts had a couple lines of detail identifying what % of their total sales comes from government, military, commercial customers, etc.
Of course this would require people wanting to move away from “how can I tarnish this account with a label?” and toward “how can I improve transparency without aiming to insult?”
It's always a bit strange when someone says they're not a fan of Elon and then proceed to give him an absurd level of benefit of the doubt by just eliding all the obvious facts that what he's doing is ridiculous and bad.
Government-sponsored was not a US propaganda badge, it was a response to a serious concern about adversarial governments influencing US debate through 3rd party cut outs. It's a difficult problem to solve but the previous employees made a good faith effort to come up with a definition and then enforce it. Musk, however, didn't do that. He took an official label with a definition that Twitter publicly discloses and applied it to a news organization he personally doesn't like despite it being completely inaccurate.
If what you're arguing, is that the label was bad, and badly or unevenly enforced what Musk has done is made it worse - not better. There's now no consistent definition, all the old organisations that were tagged are still tagged, and he's driven a bus through twitter's credibility.
Even if you accept that there was a genuine problem with the way the previous system was designed, there's simply no way to argue that Musk has improved it. And to be clear - the previous system was exactly what Musk claimed he wanted for twitter - a clear open definition you could point to, and labelling accounts rather than banning them in order to maximize free speech, if this system weren't in place before it is almost certain Musk would've loved it if a right wing bigot twitter user suggested it.
What you actually seem to be arguing is "Something should have been done, this was a thing, therefore this was the right thing to do".
"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
Whether CBC is actually neutral and non-partisan is something of a perennial political issue in Canada. I personally would say it is. A lot of the country disagrees. The opposition party wishes to cancel it. Opinion polls indicate the public believes it to be the most partisan major broadcaster in Canada.
Twitter will be wading into some very turbulent waters if they're going to start deciding which public broadcasters are "editorially independent" and which are not. Especially since there's no real consensus on the question in some of the countries which run them.
Even if there's no official interference, one must ask themselves: could people working at the public broadcaster have their careers on hold if they don't push the correct narrative?
When the media landscape is disproportionally dominated by one state-backed entity (so it really doesn't have to compete with anyone else), you can't just jump to your competitor...
Also, could pushing the correct narrative land them a cushy non-elected government job?
Except this is a pure marketing talk, ie this phrase literally doesn't mean anything quantifiable. Unless you're trying to argue that NPR's CEO, which came directly from US government propaganda agency, maintains "editorial independence" in some magic, American-specific way.
I think it's funny that all the Americans/Russians commenting here seem to believe there are only two public broadcasters in the world: RT, and NPR. And that Twitter was merely being unfair by not labeling NPR as "state affiliated." ;)
In fact, as I noted elsewhere in this thread, there are many (dozens?) of other public broadcasters around the world, most of which are not labeled as "state affiliated"--apparently in keeping with Twitter's (IMO reasonable) distinction between "state controlled" and "state funded/editorially independent."
Musk's eye of Sauron fell upon NPR--and only NPR, not Deutsche Welle or Radio France or CBC or BBC or any of the other respected independent public broadcasters--because he is, in the American sense, a right-wing nutjob with an ax to grind.
That Twitter would bend their principles--in either direction--to American domestic politics in such a transparent way should give users, especially those who are not interested in American culture wars, pause.
It's sad to see that so far much of the conversation here is going exactly how Twitter would prefer it goes... focused on whether 1% of funding qualifies as "state affiliated". When the real story is that Musk decided to arbitrarily target an organization based on his presumptions about its political beliefs.
Plenty of evidence that this isn't true, unfortunately. And that's precisely the point that the GP made: people are using this as an opportunity to split hairs over the percentage of control, rather than to identify this as yet another way in which Elon Musk abuses his ownership of Twitter.
>Musk's eye of Sauron fell upon NPR--and only NPR, not Deutsche Welle or Radio France or CBC or BBC
Well, sure, but you gotta start somewhere. At least this is a move in the right direction; let's hope for similar labelling for other media that deserve it.
I assume Musk will get distracted by something else--a bathroom-humor pun off the name of one of his companies, say, or realizing that 4/20 is just around the corner again, or the implacable, unconquerable, immutable existential sadness of realizing that he's truly alone in this world with nobody, despite all his wealth and power, whom he can trust truly loves him--before he realizes there are public broadcasters in other countries.
C'est la vie. It's hard being at the top (depending on the stock price on a given day).
You should consider the context of using that label on Twitter, not just the label name itself. State-affiliated label on Twitter means something as "biased", it's not used on its pure definition in a vacuum. That's the problem.
Not in any way that doesn't label literally everything anyone says as biased. When was the last time you actually listened to one of their news broadcasts? They are annoyingly neutral both sidesing issues where one side is clearly insane and doesn't represent anyone's real views except the one guy who found a megaphone. If there's a bill in the statehouse recognizing puppies as cute they'll find the one guy who's anti-dog and willing to die on that hill.
Extremely biased is Jon Stewart, a person who does a news broadcast with the express purpose to take a stance and say something.
You say this but the subject matter of their journalists implies certain preferences that are aligned with the government's.
Until NPR starts including journalistoc voices that are critical of ESG, abortion access, and other pet projects the current administration is fond of then the designation is apt.
NPR used to be a great news source in the 90s and 2000s. That hasn't been the case since about 2012.
> Until NPR starts including journalistoc voices that are critical of ESG, abortion access, and other pet projects the current administration is fond of then the designation is apt.
I don't understand, the NPR bias was there when those were not pet projects of whatever government under Trump, correct? So why does a change in government then changes the stance of NPR if that stance was there before the current government took power?
Also, being critical of abortion access is simply stupid in 2023, it's founded on religious grounds and I don't think religion should be part of any social policy discussion... Requiring a journalistic institution to cater to "both sides" is either naive or absurdly stupid.
Being biased or having a specific political stance is not the same thing as state affiliation; it's just ... (dis)agreeing with policies. Were they "state affiliated" during the Trump admin?
The harping on their bias in this thread is ridiculous, because unless the government is telling them what to write, it's entirely irrelevant.
> NPR used to be a great news source in the 90s and 2000s. That hasn't been the case since about 2012.
SO FUCKING WHAT. Maybe they're useless garbage now, maybe not, but either way that still doesn't make them a government mouthpiece.
> SO FUCKING WHAT. Maybe they're useless garbage now, maybe not, but either way that still doesn't make them a government mouthpiece.
Like I said, until they're critical of the administration like they were with Bush Jr, then they are nothing more than a mouthpiece of the current administration.
They may choose to say things in favor of the government (or not), but that is still fundamentally different than the government telling them what to say, which is what "state affiliated" means.
Another point is it’s facile to try to make arguments based on semantics. “Their name has public in it” is not a serious rebuttal to “It’s not government media.”
It was an even bigger joke that the BBC rejected the label. The government literally imposes a radio tax to fund the Service, and pays more out of general funds for global coverage.
When Twitter originally created the "state-affiliated" label, the implied meaning was "propaganda rag that you shouldn't trust." It wasn't meant to be applied to any media organization that receives state funding, only those that go against the American mainstream zeitgeist, e.g. the narratives you'll read in the NYTimes or NPR. This label was never meant to mean precisely what it says at face value.
NPR has been insane since Trump/2016. I play a game with a few friends/family, we tune into NPR, and see how fast they'll talk about trans issue or white supremacy ... its literally 90% of the time within 60 seconds
? At the same time they removed the state-affiliated media, from a ton of global times and CCT affiliated content creators. Guess musk really needs that tesla market in china..
Why "falsely"? I've been an NPR fan my whole life, but there is no denying at all that their coverage of american politics is nowhere near impartial. So as long as current party in power is aligned with them, they are de-factor state-aligned.
I think "falsely" because they're primarily viewer supported and less than 1% of their budget comes from the government. So it's odd for them to get the label when other news outlets like BBC and Voice of America (which is literally a state owned propaganda outlet) don't
It has the words National and Public right in its name. I'd bet many already assume NPR is somehow state related.
On a different note it's last news post on its main account had almost a million views. That is a lot of eyeballs to give up, but they don't really have advertisers to please.
What conflict of interest do you perceive? Would you rather the article was by Rush Limbaugh or do you see any items in the article that you feel misrepresent reality and that this was done because of the reporters' bias?
That does not mean there is a conflict of interest. By your standards no news organization would ever be able to report on things that they themselves are a player in. But in the real world this happens with some regularity and editorial boards have set ways of dealing with this sort of situation. They tend to become far more careful as soon as their own name is part of the story on the off chance that it could be used as proof that they are not able to report cleanly, which is then used to extrapolate to everything else they write about.
> But in the real world this happens with some regularity and editorial boards have set ways of dealing with this sort of situation
Conflicts of interest are things to know and look out for.
This is not the case of an editorial board. And, when publications write about themselves, even when there are editorial boards, there is a conflict and they may very well report the story differently than a 3rd party.
Not realizing the conflict of interest is akin to being just fine with content on a news site about a product written by someone at the product company with no label of sponsored content or something similar.
Terms sound acceptable to me. They're constantly decrying how it's full of hate speech due to Elon anyway. Time to take a stance against "hate-speech" right?
Just fyi, simultaneously saying your funds from the government are minuscule while also saying you shouldn't have them cut is just a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. Also, that in fact means you're state-affiliated and funded.
They were labeled as "state-affiliated media" and after a retraction, Twitter referred to them as "government-funded"
On March 20th, NPR listed this retraction on their website "An earlier version of this story mistakenly said Musk bought Twitter for $44 million. In fact, he paid $44 billion." [1]
Twitter can't make mistakes, but NPR makes dozens of them daily. Should we rage quit NPR everytime they issue a retraction to preserve our own independence and integrity?
It wasn't a mistake, it was intentional. Musk verified this, and even if we disregard his ramblings, they intentionally removed NPR as an example of who wouldn't be marked as state-affiliated from their description of how the label is applied, which gives the game away.
It sure doesn't seem like a mistake. Twitter itself used to make the distinction between state-funded (without editorial control) and state-affiliated (where the state has editorial control) on their own Help Center [1].
They removed the distinction on 2023-04-07 [2], two days after they slapped the state-affiliated label on NPR. That timeline sure doesn't sound like Musk made a mistake and sought to correct it, but more like he swung his whiny authority around and then people had to scramble to retract/alter policies to fit with Musk's world view.
If it was a mistake, Twitter would have owned up to it instead of altering their policies to match the mistake.
If NPR is really concerned about getting balanced news to the masses, then their decision to quit twitter, in the lack of an alternative and equivalent platform, seems short-sighted and more like a temper tantrum of a kindergartner, than that of a thoughtful and mature news organization.
It also reinforces the conspiracy theories that they were never truly independent. By making a stinker about this issue, they are trying to paint Musk as the evil overlord hell bent on strangling anyone he dislikes. NYT, WaPo and other leftist media outlets are going to join (yet again) this bandwagon, guaranteed.
I'm one of the people who thinks "government-funded" is a fair label (though "state-affiliated" isn't as it implies editorial control).
However, not putting up with someone's (or a company's) antics is not a temper-tantrum, nor a factor in if their decision was "adult" or not. If an organization is offended by a company's decision, then what's wrong with their decision to leave?
Why would they tarnish their brand by having all of their posts accompanied by a label that they deem to be false?
While I don't have proof, I believe the screaming of NPR about this issue was deliberate (yet again) attempt at painting Musk as the "Evil Overlord" about to destroy the very fabric of fairness, democracy and society.
And I never implied NPR cannot or should not leave if they disagree. The BBC example was simply drawing parallels with someone who made no stink about this and chose to stay. To my knowledge, there was no attempt from NPR to have that label corrected, which seems to be the first logical step.
Off topic, I never found NPR to be neutral or unbiased. They are great pretenders of neutrality though.
Whilst I admit that Musk is needlessly erratic, unpredictable and troll-like in these matters, part of me enjoys the pushback against legacy media on Twitter.
They've come into power by riding the Twitter hate train, maximally exploiting the algorithm that rewards rage and division. Lowering standards for journalism to a mere shadow of its former self. And yet they always have clean hands and are perfectly neutral, according to themselves.
Regardless of where you stand on this, it's interesting to watch. Journalists don't really have anywhere else to go. Their status and reach is exclusive to Twitter and cannot easily be replicated elsewhere.
"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
"Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)"
"The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution."
"Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism—especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities."
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...