231–240 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, my argument is that an institution managed by past government officials cannot be unironically called independent from said government.
So every institution employing former government officials are state affiliated? Or does this just apply to ones you don't like?
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.
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. 0: https://www.npr.org/20…
> no mention of Mastodon in this announcement 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'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?
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: 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 suppo…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2023/04/07/elon-musk-...
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.
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.
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.
(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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ru…
> 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 sti…
>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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.