"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."
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).
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because "state-affiliated" specifically means the state has editorial control - which is certainly not the case here - not merely that they provide some funding.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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+?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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%.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
? 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..
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.
"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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
>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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?)
"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”.
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'.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?”
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.
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".
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 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'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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] threadTwitter only has value so long as it has network effect. People leaving diminish it. So why not?
The label is not accurate, it’s a weapon of childish behavior.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
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
I think NPR would be very upset if the government required political neutrality as part of its funding.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's not like the government literally put their own guy as NPRs CEO: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/management-team/john-lansin...
> 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%.
Also, once again: there's a fundamental difference between "used to work" and "was a CEO".
Do I think Lansing is anything comparable? No.
Honestly I kinda like it. I would extend it to any company accepting tax breaks.
Imagine the headline 'The church of the Last days, a state-affiliated non-profit, is warning that the end is near'.
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.
It sort of loses its stigma from that view point.
https://twitter.com/BBC
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.
and the acting refers to his label changes,
right?
NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.
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
It's a pit of right-wing extremism and some of the most fawning sycophancy I've ever seen.
> Twitter's communications shop now simply responds to reporters' emails with poop emojis.
Like, does Musk realize the market of trolls, clowns, and morons who enjoy his adolescent antics is... not worth $44 B?
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).
Too bad he's such an asshole, though.
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
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?
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.
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
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.
(At this moment the last tweet is 8 hours ago after several tweets about BBC including dick "jokes")
Also, no mention of Mastodon in this announcement. It sounds like they're just going to use Facebook for the time being.
0: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...
Mastodon blew its moment. It could have eaten Twitter’s lunch. But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.
I think you don't necessarily even need that if you have a better way to support discovery and interaction with content from other places.
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'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?
I do agree that migrating between servers could be a more streamlined process though.
soo... mastodon.social? the instance listed as first option, clearly marked as being run by the Mastodon company?
But I'm sure you'll find another reason why doing exactly what you suggested isn't reasonable.
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 have not experienced that ... at all. Surely this is highly instance dependent.
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.
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.
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.
Then you're not who I'm referring to.
The reality is even once you're connected, it can be a rough place to explore for newcomers.
The great thing about Mastodon is that it doesn't push anything in my face that I didn't subscribe to.
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.
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.
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.
Instances I can recommend to HN fellows are probably https://floss.social/about, https://chaos.social/explore and https://mathstodon.xyz/about. But don't worry too much, you can move later without too much issue (though moving posts themselves is not possible).
https://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-breaks-16-month-twitter-sil...
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 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'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"
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.
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+?
Please show me the celebrity/business/politician with even a quarter as many retweets or likes as their follower count.
It doesn't happen. It's an open secret they all buy their followers. They call it 'growth hacking' or 'fake it till you make it'- I call it bullshit.
There are firms that do nothing but increase follower count.
Simply do an internet search for 'where to buy twitter followers'. It's pretty sad its literally that simple.
I wouldn't envy the hosts having to read our their addresses but npr.org could absolutely implement WebFinger if they were thus inclined
Nah.
Why do they keep saying they receive almost nothing, yet at the same time say government funding is essential to their operation?
> 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.
Sounds like it may be more than 1% in total?
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.
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.
Member stations paying NPR is the bulk of NPRs 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.
Also, here's NPR's report on financing: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance.... It also includes breakdowns of member station financing. 8% average from CPB, 5% from other government sources.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
Hard to say what percent of their funding comes from some governmental source but it’s all indirect and arms length.
A lot of folks confuse NPR With PBS which is publicly funded and many of NPR’s member stations are PBS affiliated.
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%.
What is the source of this number? Also is 4% as opposed to 1% a change that alters any of the underlying fundamentals ?
> Also is 4% as opposed to 1% a change that alters any of the underlying fundamentals ?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
PBS gets a minority of its funding from government, and a minority of what it gets from government from the Federal government.
But it gets a bigger minority of its funding from government than NPR does.
It's state affiliated. Like Tesla. Like any company who received covid relief. Tax breaks etc.
Less than 1 percentage is simply not influential. It's disingenuous to say it's owned by the government.
> 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?
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.
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.
NPR (and every other company) that relies on US roadways is giving the US govt levarage over the organization no?
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.
Hope that helps you visualize the situation.
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.
Income from a job is stable (relatively), income from other sources like say a monthly donation, is unstable.
So yes, my example is still accurate: they rely on the 1k/mo as STABLE funding.
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.
https://cpb.org/aboutcpb/financials/budget
According to NPR's 2020 budget, total revenue was $275M, of which $92.7M was "Station dues, programming and digital fees".
https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2020/Nati...
So ~ 1/3 of NPR's revenue is from member stations, and some percentage of that revenue is part of the $72M that the stations were granted from CPB.
Looking at WBUR's budget as a randomly picked example, its 2022 revenue was $39.7M of which $1.8M was grants. Let's call that 4.5%.
https://media.wbur.org/wp/2023/01/WBUR-Special-Purpose-Finan...
Let me pick another random station, WUNC. In 2018 its total revenue was $13.8M. of that CPB grants were $617.8K. Again, about 4.5%.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wunc/files/wunc_2018_...
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.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
I may have gotten my math wrong here somewhere, corrections appreciated.
I ignored the $24M and $7.3M of the CPB budget because I wasn't sure what to do with them, but you can read more about those here:
https://www.cpb.org/funding/
It's probably fair count some part of those dollars as part of NPR's funding, I just don't know how much.
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%.
Megacorp -> NPR Megacorp -> Exec -> NPR Megacorp -> Political NGO -> NPR
In addition to the direct Federal grant which is under the control of the same politicians in turn owned by these corporations.
The idea that it’s some independent real news organization is a farce.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196
> Mr Musk said Twitter was adjusting the label for the BBC to "publicly-funded". "We're trying to be accurate," he said.
If NPR is state affiliated because of 1% government funding, SpaceX should get the tag.
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
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230407155944/https://help.twit...
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.
Source? Global Times’ Twitter accounts appears properly labelled [1].
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/globaltimesnews
Yes, in part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR?useskin=vector#Funding :
"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."
[1] https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/does-npr-receive-less-1-its...
No. 34% goes to affiliate stations. A portion of that 34% goes to NPR indirectly through the fees they charge the affiliates to carry the programming.
The affiliates are not NPR.
>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.
"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."
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196
> 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.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-... has a screenshot of the "state-affiliated" tag that was recently present.
https://twitter.com/NOAA
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...
...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.
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?
"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."
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...
So yes, I really would like to see this.
> "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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018795
Do you think the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy, too?
NRA gets to run the show while the public pays the price.
But it doesn't matter; the government does not have any editorial control over NPR. That's what "state affiliated" means.
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.
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.
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.
Don't pretend you don't know the difference.
Press secretary is doing just that. Sorry but your beloved party does just that.
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.
Extremely biased is Jon Stewart, a person who does a news broadcast with the express purpose to take a stance and say something.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
"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."
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.
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.
C'est la vie. It's hard being at the top (depending on the stock price on a given day).
I'm assuming that people aren't dwelling on that because everyone already agrees that's the case.
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.
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?
https://twitter.com/bbc https://twitter.com/deutschewelle https://twitter.com/srf https://twitter.com/radiofrance https://twitter.com/CBCNews
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196
> Mr Musk said Twitter was adjusting the label for the BBC to "publicly-funded". "We're trying to be accurate," he said.
This is hilarious. Musk is trying to be a lot of things, but "accurate" is clearly not one one of them.
The joke is on all of us for giving this silly man our attention. I regret that I even know about this "news story."
https://fair.org/home/psyops-in-the-newsroom/
> "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.
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?)
"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?
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.
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
By that definition, every company in every significant industry is "state affiliated".
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.
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.
"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."
Laundering information.
[0] https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-... [1] CIA Officer Frank Snepp discusses planting stories in Vietnam: youtu.be/UwerBZG83YM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2023/04/07/elon-musk-...
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.
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.
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.
The average user won't even notice their tweets are missing from their feed.
It's also a great opportunity for networks like Mastodon to pick up steam and mindshare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
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?
[1] https://www.npr.org/corrections/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
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.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230407155944/https://help.twit...
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.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33462184 (warning: BBC is explicitly supported by the British Government)
> some personal beef the owner has with NPR
NPR is a bogeyman of the American right-wing media, which Musk seems to be consuming an awful lot of in recent years.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/15/the-gu...
You should check these things before posting. It says "Government-funded Media" right at the top of the page here: https://twitter.com/BBC
Someone is winging it.
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.
> 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.
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.
(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)
Brilliant insight. Thank you.
Edit: Actually VOA does have it now; I swear I checked just two days ago... Their various foreign language accounts still aren’t labeled though.
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?”
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".
For most people USA is an adversarial government. You've just confirmed it was a propaganda badge meaning "unamerican".
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?
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
The state-funded tag is a bit much. But to claim NPR is a pure journalism play isn't accurate either.
"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."
[A] https://www.npr.org/about/ [B] https://www.npr.org/ethics/
It's maddening. Artisan hand-crafted propaganda.
What's your definition of "state funded"?
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.
The irony? We'd have to rely on the media and "modern journalism" to apply the proper labels.
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.
https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...
https://www.mixdexhq.com/tv-news/here-are-jim-lehrers-10-rul...
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like journalism to me. Journalism has never meant nor implied 'impartial reporting.'
I mean, they are, so where's the lie?
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.
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.