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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'

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding? Are they a "media" company primarily dedicated to the practice of journalism?

the account is media, and it's as state affiliated as NPR, if not moreso as for whether it's a media company , that's irrelevant and seems to be an attempt to move the goalposts

It's not irrelevant. I think it's a useful distinction.

All companies have PR departments (except, of course, Twitter, which only responds with poop emoji.)

Company PR departments generally report on the company and things which directly affect the company. They issue press releases and they comment on litigation and they celebrate anniversaries.

Journalism organizations and public information outlets don't merely report on themselves, they report on the world, or topics of interest to their advertisers or donors or governments or supporters. Therefore there's a wider range and there's a third-party nature to it. Journalists may be investigative, or sometimes they may just regurgitate press releases from various companies. From wide ranges of different types of various companies. Even if a news outlet reports only on dentistry, there's still a wide range of dental topics that are covered, not just Colgate and their toothpaste.

So I agree; NPR should be properly labeled according to the government which supports them. So should PBS, right? There's no shame in that. Why don't Facebook and Google do it too? YouTube regularly slaps a label on government mouthpieces that I tune into there. It's important to be even-handed and label the Chinese and Russians the same as the Venezuelans and Germans and Irish and Catholics and Orthodox the same as the United States.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding? My first thought. How much in easy loans have his companies received from the government? This is just rich people hating on the industry that publicly critiques them.

1. SpaceX and Tesla do not publish news 2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy' 3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch 4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations fr…

Can we please drop the Twitter free speech façade? We all know it's not true. He's banned activists at the behest of right wing influencers. He's banned parody accounts. He banned the account posting public flight log data of his plane. He banned people for posting links to Mastodon, then unbanned (some of?) them, then prevented people from interacting with tweets linking to Substack. If you search Twitter for "substack", it searches for "newsletter" instead!

It's so tiring having to rehash this in every conversation about Twitter, so… please, let's just acknowledge that Elon doesn't care about free speech and move on with our lives.

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding? My first thought. How much in easy loans have his companies received from the government? This is just rich people hating on the industry that publicly critiques them.

1. SpaceX and Tesla do not publish news 2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy' 3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch 4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations fr…

> Musk allows organisations free reign to critique anyone and anything they like

That's why you were not allowed to like or retweet posts that linked to substack, right?

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

#574
Unlike Twitter that is still selective on labeling. YouTube pretty much label every public media, that includes DW, BBC, and also NPR. Why do the stake seems much higher on Twitter? I'm thinking that's because journos, blobs and think tankers personally hang out on Twitter unlike YouTube.

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

#575
Does this marking only apply to US media or media active in the US?

Swiss public broadcasting such as @SRF is publicly funden but lack suck label. However you would have a very hard time finding someone in Switzerland that does not know this as there is constant debating about the fee which almost everyone has to pay separately from taxes.

German public television is also not marked.

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that labelling medias with their true funding diminishes their credibility so much that they’d flee to any place where this information is not disclosed.

The problem isn’t that Twitter is labeling media with true funding. If it was, you’d be seeing under MSNBC or CNN or Fox News who their main sponsors are (which are probably bigger than NPR’s government contribution). So by cherry picking only some funding sources to label with, that means that you are trying to present a narrative. (or if Twitter is not trying to present a narrative, instead it means that they‘re ju…

[deleted]

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

#578
post #317

Should Twitter itself get a state sponsored label for getting concessions from San Francisco on their headquarters? https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-controller-hails-... Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding? It's hard to see this as anything but silly politics games.

Whether or not it's applied consistently doesn't even help the situation. The goal is clearly to muddy the waters on what we mean by state-sponsored media. Even if he labels everything consistently as state-sponsored, it nonetheless serves to mask organizations without editorial independence by creating confusion within the discourse.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various companies in China are on US embargo lists because they are state-affiliated. Parsing out "media" companies is just hyper-targeting of ire. All companies that post tweets are effectively media. So why only highlight "news media" on a publication app such as Twitter?

The label is "state-affiliated media" so it makes sense that the label isn't applied to Twitter or SpaceX, not because they aren't state-affiliated, but because they aren't media. And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased, as opposed to e.g. Raytheon which is objectively state-affiliated but nobody expects to be doing objective report…

Twitter isn’t media? They call themselves ‘social media’ in their AppStore description.

https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/twitter/id333903271

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

#580
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Hope that helps you visualize the situation.

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.

No, that's incorrect. You're comparing unstable funds vs stable funds.

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.

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