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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'

#691

Post by LastTrain »

nailer wrote: post #489
LastTrain wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

#692

Post by macintux »

hgsgm wrote: post #617
wpietri wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. I was one of the people who quit Twitter in November. It has been a real loss for me, going from 7k followers on Twitter to 0.1k on Mastodon. Especially now that I'll be soon starting a job hunt, I miss that. But when I review my reasons for leaving Twitter [1], I'm not regretting it. I would rather have no platform than that platform. And the calculation for brands is surely much more fraught. I expect…

Do people hire for (non-PR) jobs based on tweets?

I found a tech evangelist job via an informational account I ran for a language community, and was hired in part because of it.

I suppose that’s PR, although I eventually switched to engineering.

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

#693

Post by jacquesm »

mfer wrote: post #690
jacquesm wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What conflict of interest do you perceive? Would you rather the article was by Rush Limbaugh or do you see any items in the article that you feel misrepresent reality and that this was done because of the reporters' bias?

The conflict of interest is that he is writing about an organization he works for.

That does not mean there is a conflict of interest. By your standards no news organization would ever be able to report on things that they themselves are a player in. But in the real world this happens with some regularity and editorial boards have set ways of dealing with this sort of situation. They tend to become far more careful as soon as their own name is part of the story on the off chance that it could be used as proof that they are not able to report cleanly, which is then used to extrapolate to everything else they write about.

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

#694

Post by Jenepas »

KZerda wrote: post #342
bagels wrote: 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.

Or more to the point, with how much of twitter is owned by the Saudi government? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-hol...

[flagged]

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

#695

Post by Auracle »

hintymad wrote: post #671

A criticism of NPR that I often see online is that NPR is leftists' propaganda machine (not government's, mind you, but democrat's). However, is this criticism true, though? To me, a propaganda machine would lie or weave facts to paint false pictures. I think it's perfectly okay if a media is either left leaning or right leaning. Heck, it's even okay if a media is extreme left biased or right biased, as long as the m…

https://allthingsreconsidered.buzzsprout.com/

Episode 3 (trans dinosaurs) and the follow up are one good example.

But honestly, just turn on your station and listen. Unless you're so far left you can't tell the difference, it should be pretty obvious - although it was even worse when Trump was president.

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

#696

Post by hot_gril »

roflyear wrote: post #593
hot_gril wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why else do they get this source of funding that other networks don't have? (Though this is still just a theory and not reason to slap "govt-affiliated" on them. "Govt-funded" is fair.)

Primarily, because NPR affiliate stations service areas where there aren't incentives for private stations. Meaning, without these public radio stations, these areas would be without news and the entertainment broadcasting NPR provides. This isn't true for stations like WNYC, but it is true for much of the US. The small affiliates need subsidies, because it costs a lot to run the stations. NPR has done like, a millio…

NPR, the national organization, receives federal funding. Maybe not a lot, but still more than anyone else.

> NPR has done like, a million segments on this

Yeah, and I've heard one of them, but are you really going to take NPR's own explanation for its funding without a grain of salt?

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

#697

Post by Eric_WVGG »

hidden80 wrote: post #3

It's so wild witnessing the degradation of Twitter.

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.

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

#698

Post by flavius29663 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #608
jacquesm wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's irrelevant, the label implies control like with the Russians and the Chinese, and that control simply isn't there.

What do you think about Al Jazeera's funding and level of control?

not OP, but I watch Al Jazeera a lot, they're more fair than NPR, they at least invite the "other party" to the talkshow, no matter how ridiculous they sound (e.g. russian people supporting the war). NPR hasn't done that in years, they do a literal strawman: they quote what a republican said (or they replay a short part from a speech) and then the all democratic leaning attendees talk about the subject. It's laughable. I wouldn't just blindly trust Al Jazeera either, I would double check whatever they say, but at least I can learn about the world from a different perspective: they cover a lot from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, which are places that Western Media usually ignores (unless it's something really big).

NPR is very high quality when it comes to art, science and other shows, but fails spectacularly when it's a political subject.

NPR has the opportunity to be a world class media group, like BBC and Al Jazeera, but they chose to waddle in mud together with the democratic party, estranging half of the US population - which could have been an easy win for them.

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

#699

Post by anonymouskimmer »

lostlogin wrote: post #633
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #337

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.

[flagged]

I could somewhat see him trying to be fair after first acting out of spite. But why isn't the PBS NewsHour account labeled as government-funded media?

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

#700

Post by anigbrowl »

This was pretty much the aim; occupy the territory and drive others out. The goal isn't for Twitter (or X) to make money, as such, but to have a monopoly on real-time mass communication and leverage that monopoly to pick which content 'wins'. All the complaints about Twitter and other big tech companies are essentially a to-do list of what will happen following their capture or neutralization.
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