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NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

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Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#251

Post by JohnFen »

throwaway743 wrote: post #165
chiefalchemist wrote: post #79

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.

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".

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#252

Post by JohnFen »

photochemsyn wrote: post #154
md_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger "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...see…

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…

> 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

By that definition, every company in every significant industry is "state affiliated".

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#253

Post by ceejayoz »

starbase wrote: post #213

Here's what NPR's own website says about their federal funding: "Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR." "Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)" "The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for…

That excerpt isn't about their funding. The CPB funds (in part) public radio stations.

Many of those public radio stations purchase NPR-produced content. (And from other similar providers like American Public Media (Marketplace), PRX (This American Life), etc.)

NPR's customers can't afford NPR's offerings without said Federal funding, which is why NPR's particularly interested in it.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#254

Post by Spivak »

justin66 wrote: post #197
throwaway8582 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not the BBC, curiously You should check these things before posting. It says "Government-funded Media" right at the top of the page here: https://twitter.com/BBC

I shit you not: it did not an hour ago.

https://archive.ph/VJhTR recorded on 12 Apr 2023 07:43:40 UTC.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#255

Post by JohnFen »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #203

How on earth can anyone say "falsely labeled"? NPR does get money from the federal government, that is an undisputable fact. How are they not "state-affilated"? I don't care how small a % of the budget is money from the government. The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

> The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

In that case, very nearly every business (including mom and pop shops) is "state affiliated" and one has to ask why NPR is being singled out for this.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#256

Post by aquova »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64
segasaturn wrote: post #9

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 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.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#257

Post by photochemsyn »

acdha wrote: post #185
photochemsyn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#258

Post by drooby »

clipsy wrote: post #217
hitpointdrew wrote: post #203

How on earth can anyone say "falsely labeled"? NPR does get money from the federal government, that is an undisputable fact. How are they not "state-affilated"? I don't care how small a % of the budget is money from the government. The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

Great, so you agree that Tesla and SpaceX must also be labeled as state-affiliated, right? And of course every single company that took PPP money, and...

Twitter’s policy seems to specifically mention “media” accounts. Not just any business.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#259

Post by kdkdkdosp »

md_ wrote: post #210
colpabar wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#260

Post by oefrha »

trasz3 wrote: post #70

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.

Interestingly, VOA, RFA etc. are not labeled state-affiliated media.

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.

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