A) I never said Twitter should be labelled a state-owned news company, just whether it should be labelled state-owned.
B) Twitter (like all "platforms") holds the ability to control the flow of information. The moment a "platform" puts their finger on the scales and blocks certain types of legal information from being discovered (as they did last week in blocking substack links, for example) then they forfeit their claim to being a "platform" and should be treated as media distribution companies. As such they should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as news organizations should be
> Twitter doesn’t report the news. It’s a platform. Labels are for publishers of news.
“A platform” is just an internet term for a kind of publisher (roughly corresponding to “an online publisher who mostly publishes things for which it is – or would be, if it was operating in the US – protected from the liability usually attached to publishers via DMCA section 230.”)
Personally yes, when i hear everyone clamour for transparency, I want brutal honest transparency, so yes twitter handle and twitter docs should clearly mention that they are owned by Saudia and terrorist Qatar.
Same with DW News, Al Jazeera, Middle East eye and Gulf news.
I've always wondered, without pure transparency, who will guard the guards?
At least DW is totally transparent about it. A quick look at their web site gives you that info immediately. The info page about it even figures as one of the top Questions in their FAQ:
"DW is Germany’s international broadcaster. It is organized under public law and funded by the German federal tax budget."
"DW is financed via funding from the state, i.e. from tax revenue. This is in contrast to the domestic public channels, which are funded via broadcasting fees."
Al-jazeera is one of the most renowned news agencies in the world, finally giving an honest voice to the Arab and Islamic world,
and they can do this because they don't rely on pleasing advertisers.
What do you mean by anti-sentitic?
Jesus have you seen Al Jazeera covering how Qatar has been known to be a permissive environment for terror financing, reportedly funding U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Al qaeda and ISIS, as well as several extremist groups operating in Syria. At least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to the mastermind of the 9/11. Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, also made Doha his headquarters for years while the Qatari's--with the Qatari's Government support and even the Muslim Brotherhood has received significant support from Qatar. Of course, not all of this is supported by the government in Doha. Many individuals and charities in Qatar have been known to raise large sums of money for al-Qaeda, the Nusra front, Hamas, and even ISIS. (
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115hhrg26427/html/C... html). Be use I haven't?
Also what about their hard hitting on average of Qatargate and human rights abuses including killings of their LGBTQ dissidents?
Qatar is a state sponsor of terrorism and Al Jazeera is a terrorist network.
According to official US Committee on Foreign Affairs, has been known to be a permissive environment for terror financing, reportedly funding U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Al qaeda and ISIS, as well as several extremist groups operating in Syria. At least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to the mastermind of the 9/11. Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, also made Doha his headquarters for years while the Qatari's--with the Qatari's Government support and even the Muslim Brotherhood has received significant support from Qatar. Of course, not all of this is supported by the government in Doha. Many individuals and charities in Qatar have been known to raise large sums of money for al-Qaeda, the Nusra front, Hamas, and even ISIS.(https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115hhrg26427/html/C...)
Let me know when Al Jazeera and Middle East eye cover any of the human rights abuses and funding for Hamas or even the brutal repression of LGBTQ in Qatar.
Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla are not newspapers/publishers. The reason for labelling news organisations' government affiliations is for the viewer/reader to understand that there may or may not be bias, and where the funding is coming from.
If NPR's government contributions are embarrassing for the organisation, it might be best for them to forgo that funding. Additionally, if there's no influence/bias, then why does it matter that their funding is disclosed to the reader?
Because the label has a connotation that is not accurate.
Connotation is just as important as denotation when evaluating meaning and accuracy of statements. Engineers love to pretend otherwise - that's probably part of why we're engineers - but that doesn't make them right.
A connotation is subjective and should not matter. Public funding however is. In my country there are more or less trustworthy government funded news stations that are also flagged. At least on youtube.
But I believe the label is more important than what some people fear other people would maybe perceive.
It would simply be a connotation if Twitter's own documentation on what that tag means didn't explicitly state that the tag means that the source's editorial process may be influenced by the government organizations funding them. That's not the case for any of the current organizations that have gotten that tag.
The connotation is a product of how the label was inconsistently applied in the past. Consistent application of the label will solve this problem pretty soon, without requiring Twitter to make judgment calls that should be beyond its purview
Fair enough, but without doing linguistic gymnastics, "State-affiliated" should also be seen by any reasonably educated adult to indicate "State-edited". "State-funded" is an appropriate tag! I'd recommend this, actually.
NPR show Frontline is a great place to start this education.
Attempting to place NPR and that kind of sentiment in the same conversation as anything other than a great example of how Gov't funds can be provided without such _control_ is disingenuous at best.
Virtually no media companies admit to being state edited, even if they are literally a department of the government. Heck it's common even for government agencies to claim they are independent of "the government" despite being a part of it. So if that were the bar, there'd be no such labelling at all.
They are playing fast and loose with their accounting by ignoring the large contribution that comes from local affiliate stations, local affiliate stations that receive a large part of their funding from the corporation for public broadcasting, a government sponsored entity.
In reality government funding accounts for much more than 1% of NPR's budget.
it seems its not. they say 30% of NPRs funding come from local affiliates paying for NPR programming. And on average those local NPRs get 8% of their funding from government. Do the math, that means 2.4% + 1% of NPR comes directly government
"And on average those local NPRs get 8% of their funding from government."
NPR itself [1] says that figure is 13 percent, counting state governments. In either case, I am comfortable that NPR is editorially independent but also comfortable saying that without government money, it's a podcast network.
The power of the purse is the power to pull strings even if that power is not currently being used, and even if the marionette would scream really loudly if the strings were pulled. I don't think "state-affiliated" was a fair label. "Government-funded" was, and NPR is damaging its credibility more than Twitter could by pitching a fit over it.
but as v0idzer0 pointed out in a reply to your similar comment above
"it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best"
"closely associated with another typically in a dependent or subordinate position"
"an organization that is officially connected with or controlled by another, usually larger, organization"
dependent: "relying on another for support" (also uses of the words "need" and "requires")
I would agree with parent comment - NPR is not directly, closely affiliated with the state. And isn't in a subordinate position with the state. It has about 12% of its funding from tax dollars, but I think it'd likely exists without that.
I also agree with parent comment they are state funded, however, and anyone who had 12% of their income from a given source for free and no work would be biased and influenced to be friendly towards them. To suggest that the people who work at and run NPR are free from bias and influence is demonstrably not true, and so it also follows we can't assume they would approach their funding without bias.
Is it? "State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution."
Yeah but it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best
Twitter:
“Financial Resource”
Considering we do have a law around funding NPR and the company would be impacted of that funding went away, personally I see it as appropriate.
However, I also see it appropriate that Fox News and Washington Post get the same tag. (party political pressures)
I was responding to the "As per Twitter’s criteria, it’s money." part. Fox and WP as state-affiliated seems weird to me: being close to a party line is not necessarily the same as state-affiliation. (Given we're talking a democracy and not a one-party state - I don't think you could make that distinction in e.g. China due to how interconnected it is there)
Parties absolutely have access to these outlets.
We all have to be blind to think that if Biden request WP to write something positive, they wouldn’t? Same with Fox and Trump.
Does the govt use influence to persuade news outlets? Of course they do. Any major news outlet that says they are 100% independent and doesn’t have some percentage of outside influence is outright lying.
Does the Whitehouse (in general) use press access passes as bartering chip, yes of course!
With that said, “state-affiliated” depends on criteria. Whether it’s agreed upon or not, Twitter set their criteria. Other outlets set their criteria as well…on news, politics, health, and illicit.
NPR was, quite-literally created by an act of the United States congress.
It receives DIRECT funding from the United States government.
Twitter was generous in changing the label from "State-affiliated" media (given that it was literally created by the US Government) to "Government-funded media".
There is no possible argument against the "Government-funded media" label that makes sense. They're government funded. NPR's parent company, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is also government funded. Neither of these funding points are debatable (aka Full stop).
Corporations and institutions/foundations make up more than half of NPR's funding. And that exceeds the pledge drive funding, which collectively vastly exceeds the government funds they receive.
When NPR runs their "ADM Supermarket to the World" spots, that is telling you who is really funding them and who to worry about exerting editorial control.
And then lets run the same statistics for administrations from the other side. After all, state-controlled media would have to follow switching government lines on this, so it'll show Republicans loving NPR and Democrats hating it during the previous administration, correct?
I'm not making a claim on political affiliation (and don't have a detailed opinion on it, being not from the US I don't read NPR stuff very much and have never heard any of their radio programmes). It's not necessary for my argument. (People desperately trying to turn everything they dislike into government-led propaganda is sadly an international pattern)
>I don't read NPR stuff very much and have never heard any of their radio programmes).
Then you should do so. Especially Fresh Air, Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!, Car Talk (although, sadly that's just an archive -- no new shows), Story Corps[0] and a whole bunch of others that have exactly zero to do with anything political.
I wanted to add Forum as well, but since it's from KQED[1] I'm sure some folks around here will call it the propaganda arm of the People's Republic of California. <eye-roll>.
And Marketplace, On Point, RadioLab, Science Friday and a bunch of others from WBUR[2]. And WNYC[3] and WAMU[4] also have a number of shows that never even mention the dysfunction in the US political system.
That said, there are many NPR (and member station) shows that actually report the news of the day and cover political topics -- regardless of party or point of view.
Okay, it's definitely not Breitbart, Zerohedge or Alex Jones, but it's certainly not a communist organization. Rather, it's center-right, just like most of the US.
Regardless, there's lots of interesting and fun stuff, especially Fresh Air. I remember being heartbroken fifteen years ago or so to find out that Terry Gross[5] was not only past childbearing age, but gay as well. Because she's so amazing, I often fantasized about having kids with her. Seriously.
A very recent episode featured a comedic rant about Gov. DeSantis. It called the Parental Rights Bill "Don't Say Gay" and joked about how he was attacking the Disney characters. Naturally all good NPR listeners would laugh about that.
Fresh Air: How many guests has she had on who might also appear on FoxNews? Versus MSNBC, CNN, NYT, or WaPo.
I'll tell you why they do that: if they presented a non-querulous story about the Hunter Biden laptop, their contributors would angrily demand to know why they're presenting "Fox News talking points."
>A very recent episode featured a comedic rant about Gov. DeSantis. It called the Parental Rights Bill "Don't Say Gay" and joked about how he was attacking the Disney characters. Naturally all good NPR listeners would laugh about that.
Yup. And I bet it was hilarious! They send up everyone. No particular political affiliation required. It's a comedy "game" show.
And when they skewered Obama and Clinton and Kerry and Biden and Harris and Pritzker (WWDTM is based in Chicago) and countless other people you disagree with as well as many, many you do agree with including Ron deSantis[0].
>Fresh Air: How many guests has she had on who might also appear on FoxNews? Versus MSNBC, CNN, NYT, or WaPo.
Well, since Fresh Air is almost all interviews with novelists, musicians, actors and other interesting cultural stuff, I suppose that most of the folks who Watch Fox News, if they like fiction, music, movies and theater would love to hear interviews with those folks.
And those who are interviewed on Fresh Air are usually flogging their new book/album/movie/art installation/whatever, so I'd imagine most of them would appear on any media outlet that would have them.
>if they presented a non-querulous story about the Hunter Biden laptop,
You've clearly never listened to Fresh Air, because the wouldn't do a Hunter Biden laptop story, or a Jared Kushner (yes, I love the UAE's money more than I love Ivanka, and I love Ivanka a lot!) story either.
Because it's not a political show, it's a show about culture (music, fiction, movies, etc.) and the creative people who generate it.
As I pointed out, not everything is about a bunch of gasbags bloviating about how terrible the other guy is. That shit is really tired. And has been for quite some time.
Are you an American? If so, you're my fellow citizen and potential collaborator in helping to solve the myriad issues we have here. Not my adversary or my enemy. But a fellow human and potential friend -- even if (and I have no idea one way another) we don't share the same political beliefs.
the truth is that just about all Americans agree on many, many more things than they disagree.
I find it reductive and insulting to have to justify liking non-political stuff to folks who insist that everything they don't like (and that goes for all those afflicted with Hunter Thompson's disease[1], not any particular viewpoint, whether I agree with their policy ideas or not):
But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his
exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by
tinhorn politicians.
The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor
devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment
on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as
to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be
said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease.
It's divisive, unpleasant and really, really tired. Please stop.
>Well, since Fresh Air is almost all interviews with novelists, musicians, actors and other interesting cultural stuff, I suppose that most of the folks who Watch Fox News, if they like fiction, music, movies and theater would love to hear interviews with those folks.
> And those who are interviewed on Fresh Air are usually flogging their new book/album/movie/art installation/whatever, so I'd imagine most of them would appear on any media outlet that would have them.
So I guess your answer is "none" then?
> You've clearly never listened to Fresh Air, because the wouldn't do a Hunter Biden laptop story, or a Jared Kushner (yes, I love the UAE's money more than I love Ivanka, and I love Ivanka a lot!) story either.
"They" is NPR here, not Fresh Air (which I do listen to). NPR News or All Things Considered is "they." Show me where that laptop story was covered anywhere on NPR or PBS.
I hosted a guy at Google, Hugh Sinclair, who talks about the reality of microfinance, having spend 10 years in the field doing it. He was turned down for Fresh Air.
> As I pointed out, not everything is about a bunch of gasbags bloviating about how terrible the other guy is. That shit is really tired. And has been for quite some time.
Everything on NPR is, unfortunately, unless it's about the arts. And even there, it's heavily over-weighted to "arts by under-represented people."
> when they skewered Obama and Clinton and Kerry and Biden and Harris and Pritzker
when was that, exactly?
> most of the folks who Watch Fox News
Oh, the condescension there.
> it's divisive, unpleasant and really, really tired. Please stop.
Fortunately, if you only listen to NPR, you'll never have to hear it.
Yikes - I didn't see this earlier but this is the kind of thing we ban accounts for, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please don't do this again.
To get that out of the way, you can follow the smart process proposed by the person you answer to:
If indeed the organization is biased because government funded, it means that they will never publish stories that the government is not happy with.
So, under Biden, they will not publish stories that Democrats don't like, and under Trump, they will not publish stories that Republicans don't like.
If it is not the case, then they are not biased because government funded. They may be politically biased for other reason, but it does not matter if they are government funded or not, and it is stupid to give them a label "government funded" to warn about bias if "government funded" has nothing to do with this bias. Especially because it means that non-government-funded organization can be as biased but not have any label.
Your arguments seem to hinge on some hypothetical world where Republicans are in charge AND the executive agencies are all on board with their agenda. Then, to be "government funded" NPR would have to hew to the Republican line. Q.E.D.
Maybe the first part of that will happen someday. It hasn't yet. In fact, large parts of the civil service are permanently one party and do not change when the other party takes charge (as, indeed, the Civil Service reforms of the 19th Century set out to insure). Only about 4,000 jobs are politically appointed, according to Wikipedia.
If the executive agencies are imposing their agenda rather than the "government agenda", then, they are not biased for being "government funded", they are being biased for being "funded". If the government has no power, they could be "government funded", or "privately funded", or whatever, they are not manipulated by the government, they are manipulated by a lobby.
What you are saying is that there is a group of interest that are independent of the government, and that has an influence because they are giving money.
Why should we had a label when this group of interest is "the executive agencies", but not when it is "the investors of Wall Street", the "mass media conservative groups", the "christian lobby", ...?
(I don't pretend it's the case. I think people who really believe that the evil executive agencies impose their agenda are idiot who are not able to mentally comprehend that maybe NPR news are biased because their redaction is politically biased, with or without the existence of executive agencies)
(also, the reasoning on 4'000 jobs politically appointed is very weak: while there are way more than 4'000 jobs in the executive agencies, the very very very majority of these jobs have ZERO decision power, and the position of power in these agencies are the one politically appointed. If these executive agencies are sending memos to bias the media, or even renegotiating the contracts or the refunding based on what the media have published, it is with the support of the politically appointed board of directors)
I'm not even the person you asked. What exactly is your goal? Get a random person on the internet to disagree with you about something that's not even on topic for the discussion at hand?
You’ve supported my point: there’s no consistent forced state narrative. Bias for or against a political party is orthogonal to whether the state itself is executing editorial control.
The Twitter Files show government agencies directly pressuring Twitter to cover or suppress stories. They did this despite a Republican president being in power.
So yes, that is "the state itself [is] executing editorial control." You are just spinning words if you say, "ok, yeah, they do it, but it's not consistent."
How is "I'd not seen that part, details please" a delaying tactic? You'd really help your argument if you, you know, supported it instead of trying to divert with questions. Sorry that I don't take "The twitter files prove that the government controls NPR" at face value.
That's really the best you can do? One story that amplifies NPR's dislike of Saudi Arabia ("Yemen" is hardly the centerpiece of Biden foreign policy),
and another claiming there's dislike of the Democratic primary calendar?
Because the NPR receives almost no money from the federal government. Read the article. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Although NPR receives less than 1% of its direct funding from the federal government, member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from state governments, and also the US government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1/3 isn't 100%, but it's also far from insignificant.
Hold on, 1/3 of what? What funding paid the dues back to CPB?
My local affiliate breaks their funding down as 50% member support, 40% corporate/charitable underwriting, 10% state/local govt funding. Maybe other NPR affiliates also get federal grants, but this one doesn’t.
Seems like we’re back to a pretty small fraction of funding for the US State to exert hard control over the content produced.
> 1/3 isn’t 100%, but it’s also far from insignificant.
It gets 1/3 from member stations, which get “far more” than 1% from various levels of government.
“Far more than 1%” of 1/3 does not mean “1/3”. It’s actually, IIRC, about another 4% of NPRs funding that indirectly comes from government this way, bringing NPR to about 5% government funding, including indirect government funding through its members stations.
They are not categorized as a publisher. They receive legal protections as such. This will quickly evolve into a section 230 debate.
I do agree social media companies should be categorized as a publisher - or content providers, but they are not. I think changing section 230 would solve a lot of problems by removing very specific legal protections, which news companies do not receive, and help prevent clear issues such as knowingly promoting false information.
There are those that disagree with me. Problems exist with any solution such as who should judge what should not be allowed and would the counter devolve into an organization that could control information dissemination? A valid point. I think the answer is already out there - a very low standard (or to say another way the high burden of proof required) current news organizations are held to by law, which most seem not to debate is too restrictive, or some line between nothing and that.
There is a lot of academic discourse on this topic and I recommend researching 230 more. It’s a fascinating policy debate with pros and cons on both sides. It was written in 1996, the year the palm pilot and the Pentium 166MHz processor was introduced.
> If NPR's government contributions are embarrassing for the organisation, it might be best for them to forgo that funding.
Ah, yes, the old "if I misrepresent the issue and assign a negative emotion to it, other people will see it as bad" trope. That's fun.
Do you have any evidence they find the contributions "embarrassing" as opposed to finding the label an intentionally-misleading dog whistle? Or is that not something that occurred to you?
I don’t think this really answers the greater point that the commenter made though. Without the public funding, they wouldn’t have the label—-whether they deem it embarrassing or opposed to its perceived meaning.
Elon publishes commentary and opinions about policy and society to his Twitter account regularly. He probably has a much broader reach than NPR. To say he shouldn't be held to the same standards because he's not a "publisher" is laughable.
Making NPR display its funding sources for all to see is a good thing (although "state-affiliated" was not the right label). Not making other high profile accounts do the same is pure hypocrisy.
How much more “state affiliated” can you get than when Trump was in office he spent most of his day watching FoxNews and called it when he didn’t like the coverage and they acquiesced?
This is not some conspiracy theory. It was very much out in the open.
Even more recently, the house speaker gave Fox preferred access to the Jan 6th video.
I don’t even doubt you, I just don’t think it’s the same thing as consistently-affiliated state media. If anything it’s party biased, but it’s not because they’re afraid the party will jail them, kill them, or forcibly take over their business.
This is true, but Elon Musk is, let's say, a producer of content that drives engagement on the platform that is Twitter. I'd say he gets enough tax breaks and such to qualify for a state shill label. That's not even considering his many years' long business affiliation with the Saudis, even before he decided to piss away 44 billion dollars to buy one of the world's largest megaphones.
Twitter is a media company, a publisher with an editorial voice that we have to assume is independent from the Saudi government or any government funding the owner's other businesses.
more ontopic, I think its indicative of a general exodus of brands in general as well. nobody wants to pay for the checkmark, nobody wants to have their brand identity or message challenged or negated by fly-by-night impostors, and most people have lost tolerance for the abdication of moderation and safe space for a modern brand in general. The time to close your account was arguably last November when leadership fired all the employees and locked themselves out of the headquarters.
thats not to say theyre evacuating to another platform, just that 'no platform' is a safer option than twitter platform.
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 NPR will be the beginning of a fair bit of large orgs quitting Twitter, either loudly or just tailing off.
I miss the opportunity to have my posts seen by people on Twitter, but I never had that many get seen in actuality.
Your "rather have no platform than that platform" resonates with me.
It would better if we had some way to follow the large number of valid sources of information from diverse variety of online sources within one application. Whether that ends up being Twitter, or some Federated system, I would prefer that it does not come under or remain under the control of a capricious overlord.
I absolutely understand the frustration of people who are on Twitter just to do the business of journalism, cause it does not seem like a place that is all that conducive to the market for journalism or other writing. It seems more like a public-access text-based cable-news-outrage outlet these days.
Whatever happens, someone please let me know where all the people working on AI end up, cause that's something I would like to follow without all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that happens on Twitter.
I doubt it. But it's a great way to find out about opportunities. I've had 3 jobs that I only heard about because somebody mentioned it on some social medium. One was on Twitter, one Facebook, and one in a specialist Slack.
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 free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)
Also take a look at what goes on in India. If I remember correctly it took under 5 days before the whole "its going to be a free speech platform" came crashing down. I honestly like Musk overall as I believe he started companies to better humanity but to claim Musk allows organizations or people free reign on twitter is crazy at this point.
You're putting this as a known fact, but it fully relies on Elon being truthful. The Substack CEO denied this, and since he doesn't have a history of lies over the last months, I don't see any reason to give Elon the benefit of the doubt.
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.
1) They both blog, they just don't charge subscribers for the blog articles. The bias is very evident though, as they talk about themselves.
2) No, this is not what I meant. I meant easy loan terms, otherwise they would have just gone after less competitive loans in the open market.
3) Ask Elon? He gets to kill multiple birds with one Twitter purchase. Something Bezos can't do.
4) There's a distinction between "paying for something" and "paying someone who does something", and that distinction is editorial control. Ask artists and writers who sell works for hire by specification. And tell it to those who have had their accounts locked, even under Musk's ownership.
Went searching, could find a lot of In-Q-Tel investments, but nothing about an investment in SpaceX.
What I did find is that Mike Griffin, the aerospace engineer who became the top NASA administrator in 2005, had a previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital fund for national security tech.
He invested $500 million in commercial space, eventually $396 million eventually going to SpaceX, along with $454 million of outside capital and $100 million of Musk's own money in 2006. [0]
So, if there is in In-Q-Tel investment, it is logged behind the Crunchbase paywall. That said, In-Q-Tel is an excellent idea to produce better home-grown security technology, and I have no problem with it (not even with their publicized investment in Facebook, and I consider FB a plague on humanity — that's more of a slur on In-Q-Tel than In-Q-Tel is on FB).
Why start by labelling those entities you don't like, then changing the rules to allow for this label, and then slowly adding (or not) to other entities? It would be so easy to do it in a way that doesn't seem childish.
I think he would be much more psychology healthy if he dropped social media. From what I guess about his personality, it's bad for him, and also probably doesn't address any of his psychological needs. Bad habits can be hard to break, but man does he go all in.
You know the gaming term "whale"? They're the people who get so sucked into a pay-to-play game that they'll spend thousands of dollars trying to get those winning feelings. I have to suspect those people are not, psychologically speaking, perfectly well.
If Twitter is the game, Musk is the whale with so much money that he bought the company. He spent $44 billion trying to win the game. And the wild thing to me is that he's still failing at it. Things like "let that sink in" [1] and re-labeling the building "Titter" [2] are just not very good jokes. For a mere one billion dollars, he could have hired every good comedy writer in the world. Instead he has lost at least $24 billion while generating enormous amounts of reputation-puncturing press and very plausibly putting a famously hard-to-wreck company on the path to irrelevancy. If it's not the most spectacular own-goal in business history, I'd certainly like to hear about the worse ones.
> 56% of political contributions directly to candidates from private donors who gave over $100,000, went to Democrats.
> NPR is an ally of the preferred political party of the rich.
In order to infer the second statement from the first, first you have to demonstrate that >50% of political donors (not donations) of greater than $100,000 were from Democrats. Perhaps Democract-leaning donors were merely motivated to make a bunch of donations over $100k, while Republican-leaning donors made fewer donations per donor.
It would be even better if you demonstrated that >50% of political donors above a certain wealth threshold gave to Democrats over Republicans
The website I linked bins per-donor, not per-donation. Of donations from donors who gave over $100,000 total, more went to Democrats than to Republicans.
That is irrelevant. If there was a Nazi party, you'd want NPR to favor the other parties. You haven't considered the possibility that they are biased towards truth. Guaranteed funding from the government is like academic tenure, it lets you focus on what matters rather than chasing hype/click-bait, and lets you stand up to the powers that be.
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.
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.
I actually don't think it's a useful distinction, since the topic is media, not media companies. SpaceX's and Tesla's social media accounts are media, and they're both as state-affiliated, if not moreso, than NPR
folks reading posts by Tesla and SpaceX should know that aside from elmu's history of disingenuousness and outright lying, such posts are even more likely to be pro-government biased than NPR
so I agree: SpaceX and Tesla should be labeled according to the government which supports them, there's no shame in that.
Yeah, but it does seem like they're doing so only in order to justify their decision on NPR. They gave NPR the label in response to a critical article from NPR, even while NPR was explicitly listed as an organisation this label didn't apply to. Since then, they've been scrambling to change rules and texts to justify a decision that was clearly made out of revenge.
looks to me like they're expanding from the ones they know first
it's strange to me that State-affiliation is seen as a pejorative, perhaps it's an American perspective - in Europe it's somewhere between a badge of honour or incidental information about the media that needs to be considered for context
It's a pejorative according to Twitter. According to their own definition, it applies to state-controlled media that don't have independent editorial control, and tweets with this label are not boosted the way other tweets can be.
I'd say editorial control subject to private interests may be worse than actual public interests. And frankly that seems to be true of all US corporate media; most US media is very pro-corporate and it's hard to find news that tells the other side of the story. On top of that, Fox News is specifically about the political interests of its owner. But none of them get labeled for it by Twitter.
But I don't see editorial control by a government for propaganda purposes as public interest; that's just the private interests of the people controlling the government. News in the public interest would be about informing the public as honestly as possible, showing the nuance, the different sides of the story, but also asking tough questions about it and getting to the bottom of the issue. Getting the truth out. Unfortunately that's not profitable enough in a capitalist media landscape.
whatever Twitter does to show the underlying institutional-level interests an account may be representing, it's very useful context IMO
npr sees it as a problem because Twitter has previously used those labels and context blurbs to weaponise their platform against accounts and messages coming from their ideological adversaries
conversely, they've given and taken blue ticks as a seal of approval and not to certify identities as the tick nominally was meant to do, going as far as removing the tick to people who stepped out of their line politically (and showering blue ticks to everyone even mildly related to the right-thinking media-government bubble)
essentially these blurbs and labels have been used almost always negatively, but right now they're out systematically pointing out the "category" of all institutional accounts, adding a bunch seemingly every day
what they are doing now it's at least superficially the correct thing to do
they now let users introduce context blurbs instead of centrally policing right-think, and they are adding ticks to government actors, and media that is either controlled, funded or affiliated to governments - in fact they should also add any funding by large foundations whether they are public or private
as a (sporadic) user this is in my interests, and it also works for them not to have to do so much speech policing in-house
> Twitter has previously used those labels and context blurbs to weaponise their platform against accounts and messages coming from their ideological adversaries
"Previously"? It's what Twitter is doing right now. That is the thing people are complaining about. It used to be used specifically to point out state propaganda channels, but Musk changed it to using for media he doesn't like. Like NPR.
> going as far as removing the tick to people who stepped out of their line politically
By making fun of Musk.
Look, you can try to spin this as if Musk is making Twitter somehow more objective and neutral, but nobody is falling for that because that's clearly not what's going on. Musk is running Twitter as his personal propaganda platform, boosting himself and accounts he approves of, and hiding those he disapproves of. It's about his personal preference now.
> now they're out systematically pointing out the "category" of all institutional accounts
"State-affiliated media" is exactly what NPR is not. Their own explanation of that category explicitly listed NPR as an example of NOT state-affiliated media. And it clearly doesn't fit their definition of it, but Musk put it in there anyway, because he wanted to punish them for criticising him. I think they have by now created a new less-wrong category for it: "government funded", but the fact of the matter is that NPR is primarily funded by donations.
Is he also pointing out "corporate funded media", by the way? Because that would also be a really useful category to point out.
The labels are for media publishers. They are to make readers aware of the motivations of the writers. This was Twitter practice long before Musk. He just removed the bias toward not labeling US media companies.
Why would SpaceX need a label? “Warning: this rocket fuel is affiliated with the US government so maybe don’t trust it’s opinion on open flames”
An org that primarily sells media (PBS or Twitter) should live by what its primary revenue source is for that media, because it colors the media that goes out the door.
Further, are the bulk of twitter's profits derived from concessions on a lease ? I don't think so, but I'm open minded.
An org that does not sell media, but physical goods (i.e. Tesla) is arguably selling cars, not media.
I'd say its more like serious politics games. Yes, anyone who is interested in material reality knows that all media institutions are controlled by wealthy people, governments, and so on. No, that doesn't mean there isn't real benefit to some groups in projecting the illusion of their independence while simultaneously sewing doubt about the independence of other media. Material reality is a fringe idea pursued by a small minority (and shrinking all the time).
Twitter is a social network. It may have media features, but its not a media company like NYT, NPR; etc. They don't create or practice journalism. They're a platform.
There's more to media than journalism. Twitter is not merely a platform, it's a platform for communication. A medium. I'd say that makes it a media company.
EDIT: lots of discussion around this. Twitter is literally a social media company. You can split hairs on whether the “media” part of “social media” agrees with your bias here.
Some companies are even both. But in the main, Twitter is the thing that employs developers and writes code and not the thing that employs reporters and writes stories.
Here we go again...under this view, every company is a "tech" company. Does GE or John Deere write software for their hardware? Absolutely. Are they colloquially considered "tech" companies? No.
Twitter is a media company (they distribute media). Tech is their operating model to deliver media. As is Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. etc.
Tech isn't twitter's primary line of business, either. The company's value derives from the users and the content they generate. Their tech isn't unique or impressive, and nobody's there for the tech, they're there for the content.
Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
> The company's value derives from the users and the content they generate.
So you're conceding that Twitter isn't the entity generating the content.
> Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
> By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
Deere's customers are there for the tech. They're handing over money for it.
Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not saying we should call John Deere a tech company—I don't think it's the best label, even as a very broad one, for what they do—but I do think Twitter is so not one that it'd make more sense to call Deere a tech company than Twitter.
> Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
John Deere designs their own tractors. Their customers want tractors. They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Foxconn is a factory company. The thing people want from them is manufacturing. Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple. If they had no factories they would have no business.
Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates. Their users want to talk to each other, in the same way as John Deere's customers want harvested crops. But the way Twitter provides that service is through computers and software.
Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Do you think technology is a notable differentiator for Twitter?
Are new users (or actual customers—advertisers, blue-checks these days, which, LOL) signing up because they want access to the technology?
If another company cloned 100% of Twitter's proprietary technology, perfectly, how would investors react to that company, if that's all they've got?
If that company offered that tech for sale, outright, straight-up IP transfer, a single bidder owns the whole thing, what percentage of Twitter's value would that tech command on the market?
> They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Twitter could completely outsource their software development and still sell advertising to its customers.
> Foxconn is a factory company.
Wtf does this even mean? Foxconn is a semiconductor manufacturer...
> Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple.
Oh great, so Apple isn't a tech company anymore? Don't they write code that powers the back-end of virtually every iPhone in existence (backup, iCloud, iMessage, App Store, etc. etc.).
> Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates.
So how do you explain all of the sales people? Or the content regulation? Or the support? fun fact - when it was publicly traded Twitter spent nearly equally on R&D as it did S&M.
> Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Because this is OUTSOURCED. It's user generated content.
Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech". Microsoft as an example is heavily diversified and as a software publisher they sell ERP software, operating system software, business productivity software, etc. Technology is what allows them to produce and run that software.
> A media company is the thing that produces media
> Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech".
"Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software, but these are definitely things that companies produce and sell for money, or produce and offer as services.
But why are we talking about what counts as a tech company when the issue is what counts as a media company? If Microsoft was a "Cloud Services" instead of a "tech" company, Azure still wouldn't be a media entity.
The internet, like broadcast television and cable, is a medium of transmission. But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC, not Panasonic.
> "Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software
No it doesn't. That's my point. Tech isn't an industry or a category. It's an operating model. The delineation of it being an industry adds nothing of value to any discussion because its so ill-defined.
> But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC
Guess what...NBC merged with Comcast and Comcast is a telecomm company, which guess what...distributes media.
So any company that uses internet servers to run code they wrote is a tech company? John Deere wrote the firmware on the machinery they sold to farmers that connects to a server on software they wrote. Are they a tech company?
GE writes a massive amount of software. Not just for their hardware products, but all sorts of other stuff that most folks won’t ever run across.
It’s a mess of a company for sure, but just because their software isn’t common on the web, I’d still classify them as a tech company.
I think of Twitter as a media outlet. They don’t directly employ news writers, but just about all media flows through Twitter in some form or fashion. They’re intrinsically linked to the media landscape.
They are absolutely "tech". Either automotive tech or agricultural tech. I mean, if you want to be totally pedantic about it, go for it. Doesn't make it accurate though.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter have always been whatever they can aggressively monetize, as their primary piece of software hasn't financially scaled to where they need to be at quarter-after-quarter. These days, I'd say they're advertisement companies!
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 reporting.
If a media outlet is being funded by the government then readers should know that because it could affect their coverage if they fear losing that funding as a result of critical reporting. This directly applies to NPR because Republicans regularly threaten to remove its public funding in response to their coverage.
The better criticism is, why is the label applied to NPR but not e.g. MSNBC? Pretty sure at least Comcast (MSNBC's parent company) receives a significant amount of government funding.
What kind of evidence are you looking for here? The effect of financial incentives on human behavior is well-established.
Meanwhile case-specific evidence is largely unavailable. Reporters would be loathe to admit to being cowed, but are also aware that corporate executives make decisions on things like promotions and timeslots based on the bottom line, or in less well-funded entities that a loss of funding can directly lead to a loss of employment.
How about statistical evidence? Well, if Republicans are threatening NPR with the loss of funding, they could slant their coverage to placate the legislators criticizing them, or they could slant it the other way to bolster their support from the other party. In either case it compromises their neutrality, but now you can find "evidence" of this in any divergence from neutrality in either direction. Since they couldn't reasonably be expected to be infallible in the alternative, that doesn't prove anything.
So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
frankly, any evidence besides zero would be good, but ideally any evidence which is convincing. It's up to the conspiracy theorist, not the audience, to come up with such evidence, whatever it may be.
an example of evidence of such a conspiracy theory would be internal emails telling a reporter to go easy on the US government because a small portion of funding comes from it, or to attack X because the US government wants them to
statistical evidence would work too if it proves the claims of bias somehow, I leave it to you to figure out some examples
> So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
Ad Fontes tries to rate news media on the type of reporting it does and the general political skew. This doesn't capture everything, but it can be done. Except for specific topics I think it's slightly better than incentives in general, though incentives are important too.
Social media companies are media distribution companies. They're analogous to the street-corner newspaper and magazine shop, except they only occasionally pay their content producers. They're more related to media than cyberspace is to space.
> And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased
This has never been the case. Never. While some journalism sources operate in a facts-only manner, all journalistic sources have bias as to which stories they research. And historically, the press has been about propaganda, editorials, and selling papers at least as much as about reporting.
Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing". The major reason to so label them is, itself, propaganda. With the second reason being a warning to the reader to practice even more diligence than normal.
> Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing".
By your own reasoning, those other labels would be redundant. Whereas "government-affiliated" makes the reader aware of a specific kind of bias that not all media entities are subject to.
It's less helpful when those are the only news organizations that get a label. At least in the past newspapers would helpfully label themselves as the political party they supported. There's even still a Herald-Whig :) .
I know China requires Communist party committees within most large businesses. It would surprise me if this is not also the case for their news media. Note that these aren't affiliations, but actual political organizations within the businesses.
The Republicans control the house. The US is not a land of political "rulers", at least not at the moment (arguments can be made for FDR's presidency).
If you build editorial independent into a legal charter, and have a government that isn't authoritarian and protects the rule of law, why is it a contradiction?
Member stations are federally funded. Member stations pay NPR.
To say that NPR doesn’t receive a significant portion of its budget from the federal government is a lie. This same argument is made whenever a politico mentions cutting funding to NPR. There is a large push to claim that NPR receives very little funding and it’s irrelevant to the network.
But you can’t have it both ways. The lady doth protest too mightily.
> In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities.[34][63] While NPR does not receive any direct federal funding, it does receive a small number of competitive grants from CPB and federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce.[34] This funding amounts amounted to less than 0.1% of revenues, according to its 2020 public filings.
I'm not from the US so don't know the politics of this discussion, but it seems like NPR is funded more by the public directly, as well as the public sphere (foundations, universities, etc) than by the public sector. Do you have a source to the contrary?
Not OP, but I would have said misleading instead of lying.
To get the correct figure, you need to add together not just federal money for NPR but also state government money, and federal and state money for its affiliates and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR only functions in an ecosystem, and the total figure for that ecosystem is at least 14 percent according to... NPR [1]. I suspect the real figure is somewhat obscured because some of their non-government donors will get some of their money from the government(s). I do not think the public media ecosystem would exist with 14 percent less money, but I could be wrong.
“Public Broadcasters Fear ‘Collapse’ if U.S. Drops Support,” announced a New York Times headline in March of 2017. Michael Grynbaum and Ben Sisario reported for the Times:
Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The potential elimination of about $445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget.
The Federal Government prints the dollar. If you buy something with that dollar, did the Federal Government fund your expense?
It's just as disingenuous to say NPR is directly funded by the Federal government as it is to say NPR receives little money from the Federal Government since it gets a lot of money from CPB which actually gets money from Congress.
Federally funded != State Affiliated. There is no one from the Biden Administration telling them what to say. By labeling them as such, Elon/Twitter are implying that NPR has a Goebbels-like figure running it, which is mendacious at best.
Perhaps more relevantly, by expanding the use of labels indicative of state association beyond the original use of “state-affiliated media” for those orgs which are editorially controlled by governments, Musk decreases the impact and clear distinction of that label, further normalizing and empowering the actual editorially-controlled state propaganda outlets operating on Twitter.
NPR was founded by the CPB, which was created with an act of Congress and is governed by a board of directors selected by the President. If it's "mendacious" to claim NPR is state affiliated, presumably it would be completely accurate and correct to state NPR, an entity that was founded and continues to be funded by a federal government body run by presidential appointees is "not state-affiliated"?
Yes that's how words work, NPR is not State Affiliated media. No one from the government is there dictating what they report on or what projects they pursue. When a lab at a private college takes NIH funding to do research, that does not make the private research institution state affiliated. When oil and gas companies accept government subsidies, they are not labeled as state affiliated (and in this case oil and gas are far more deeply intertwined with the levers of government). Elon Musk is a reactionary polemic and these choices are obviously intended to further those goals.
"There is no undisputed definition of state media or government media. The most common definition of state media or government media refers to any media organization that is either directly or indirectly owned or operated by the state.[4]"
"...State or government media can range from media outlets that are completely under state control to editorially independent public service media outlets.[1] The term "public media" can be used to refer to state or government media and public service broadcasting (PBS). Although there are differences between them. According to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, state and government media are directly controlled by the state or government; and PBS are not.[7] According to Facebook, state-controlled media are "partially or wholly under the editorial control of a government".[8]"
Interestingly:
"Twitter uses the term "state-affiliated media" and defines it as "outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution." At the same time, "state-financed" editorially independent media are not considered "state-affiliated".[9][10]"
"The goal of the ACE network is to provide knowledge to people working in the field elections, with the intention of supporting credible and transparent electoral processes with emphasis on sustainability, professionalism and trust. "
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.