Whether CBC is actually neutral and non-partisan is something of a perennial political issue in Canada. I personally would say it is. A lot of the country disagrees. The opposition party wishes to cancel it. Opinion polls indicate the public believes it to be the most partisan major broadcaster in Canada.

Twitter will be wading into some very turbulent waters if they're going to start deciding which public broadcasters are "editorially independent" and which are not. Especially since there's no real consensus on the question in some of the countries which run them.

The policy I linked isn't new, just recently updated- they started wading into those waters a long time ago.

Even if there's no official interference, one must ask themselves: could people working at the public broadcaster have their careers on hold if they don't push the correct narrative?

When the media landscape is disproportionally dominated by one state-backed entity (so it really doesn't have to compete with anyone else), you can't just jump to your competitor...

Also, could pushing the correct narrative land them a cushy non-elected government job?

Except this is a pure marketing talk, ie this phrase literally doesn't mean anything quantifiable. Unless you're trying to argue that NPR's CEO, which came directly from US government propaganda agency, maintains "editorial independence" in some magic, American-specific way.

I think it's funny that all the Americans/Russians commenting here seem to believe there are only two public broadcasters in the world: RT, and NPR. And that Twitter was merely being unfair by not labeling NPR as "state affiliated." ;)

In fact, as I noted elsewhere in this thread, there are many (dozens?) of other public broadcasters around the world, most of which are not labeled as "state affiliated"--apparently in keeping with Twitter's (IMO reasonable) distinction between "state controlled" and "state funded/editorially independent."

Musk's eye of Sauron fell upon NPR--and only NPR, not Deutsche Welle or Radio France or CBC or BBC or any of the other respected independent public broadcasters--because he is, in the American sense, a right-wing nutjob with an ax to grind.

That Twitter would bend their principles--in either direction--to American domestic politics in such a transparent way should give users, especially those who are not interested in American culture wars, pause.

It's sad to see that so far much of the conversation here is going exactly how Twitter would prefer it goes... focused on whether 1% of funding qualifies as "state affiliated". When the real story is that Musk decided to arbitrarily target an organization based on his presumptions about its political beliefs.

> When the real story is that Musk decided to arbitrarily target an organization based on his presumptions about its political beliefs.

I'm assuming that people aren't dwelling on that because everyone already agrees that's the case.

Plenty of evidence that this isn't true, unfortunately. And that's precisely the point that the GP made: people are using this as an opportunity to split hairs over the percentage of control, rather than to identify this as yet another way in which Elon Musk abuses his ownership of Twitter.

I assume Musk will get distracted by something else--a bathroom-humor pun off the name of one of his companies, say, or realizing that 4/20 is just around the corner again, or the implacable, unconquerable, immutable existential sadness of realizing that he's truly alone in this world with nobody, despite all his wealth and power, whom he can trust truly loves him--before he realizes there are public broadcasters in other countries.

C'est la vie. It's hard being at the top (depending on the stock price on a given day).