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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'

#461

Post by mcguire »

jjulius wrote: post #265
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

>It says "Government-funded Media"... 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.

That is Musk's renaming of the "state affiliated" label originally applied to NPR, PBS, and the BBC.

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

#462

Post by giaour »

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…

At least as of the time of this comment, no special label was applied to Stars and Stripes (50% funded by the US Department of Defense), Al Hurra (100% funded by the US Agency for Global Media), or CBC (>50% funded by the Canadian government).

Maybe that's just a mistake, and every news organization that gets a dollar of funding from any government will eventually get its own "Government-funded Media" label. Or maybe Twitter's new owner is being a petty little despot and didn't like a recent NPR story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#463

Post by warner25 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #46

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…

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.

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

#464

Post by Laaas »

from wrote: post #350
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.

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.

They likely just haven't gotten around to all of them yet.

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

#465

Post by DrThunder »

generic92034 wrote: post #425
DrThunder wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence. This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.

Can you name any media company being truly independent? Or is any owner excluded from the potential list of dependencies?

I'm discussing government independence specifically, not whether companies are beholden to someone else.

Obviously all businesses are beholden to someone. Yes you should always have an interest in what/who companies are beholden to.

There's a reason Nike and Apple don't chastise the Chinese government.

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

#466

Post by shagie »

tric wrote: post #430

It would be more noteworthy if their reporters left Twitter.

It's an active and current discussion.

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646154796905136128

> Steve Inskeep (NPR): John Lansing, NPR CEO, at the ⁦ @MorningEdition meeting.

> NPR says it will de-emphasize Twitter. Aside from the misleading label, NPR says Twitter isn’t used by most Americans; drives little traffic to NPR; and “no longer has the public service relevance that it once had.”

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646155432124137474

> Steve Inskeep (NPR): NPR employees with personal accounts are told they may make their own decisions. I’ll take it day by day.

https://twitter.com/abbydphillip/status/1646166679032938501

> Abby D. Phillip (CNN) replying to morning edition meeting: At the news org level, this makes sense. And even at the reporter level, we’d all be better served spending less time on here, because the conversations happening here are increasingly divorced from what’s happening in the real world.

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646202479988686855

> Steve Inskeep (NPR) replying to Abby: This captures something real. While I am not stepping away at this time (I read all sorts of sources!), Twitter always encouraged groupthink; has never captured the full range of what’s going on; and is a less valuable resource than a year ago. I’ve been on here less.

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

#467

Post by kaeresten_dit »

Seems like a funny reaction to a label added as a subtitle to an organization with the name National Public Radio

People get attached to words or phrases without thinking about what they actually mean, seems like definitions get modified to emotionally herd the [un]imaginative/initiated

Wild that style of thinking goes that high up the chain at NPR the CEO sounds child-like with their response

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

#468

Post by jacquesm »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #398
jacquesm wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and this gives their funders editorial control how?

I was so surprised by the first statement in your comment, that I stopped reading right there, and searched online to see if I could confirm/deny the statement. Then I wrote a reply without reading the rest of your comment. I didn't say anything about editorial control.

That's the thing that matters. The funding isn't relevant, but making a ruckus about the funding is the tool through which Musk has plausible deniability that this was ever about editorial control. It is factually correct but conveys no information other than misdirection and you are falling for it hook, line and sinker. NPR has a lot of staffers, want to bet that at least a number of them have prior government employment on their CVs? Want to bet that some of them will leave NPR for government? That too would be utterly irrelevant, but you could make a nice argument about it and maybe even prove it to be factually correct. In the end it's all just noise and no signal.

State affiliated media are those media institutions that are editorially controlled by the nation state where they are based, and funding is secondary to that by a very large distance.

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

#469

Post by RobAtticus »

belltaco wrote: post #103
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…

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.

For a company that "stopped posting on Twitter" they sure post a lot: https://twitter.com/FoxNews

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

#470

Post by iak8god »

spankalee wrote: post #264
dylan604 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you do need places that are large enough, mainstream enough, and trusted enough, for the masses

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.

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