Pretty clearly disingenuous on Twitter's part. Whether you agree with content on NPR or not, it doesn't change depending who is in power. It would have been nonsensical to apply this label during the last administration.
(Fox News gets about the same percentage of revenue from MyPillow and Balance of Nature as NPR does from grants)
My joke here is way to seriously say that if simply receiving money from a source is enough to indict an organization, then we have a lot of work to do beyond NPR to be suspicious of everyone. But if the requirement is what it has traditionally been, showing actual evidence of influence or coercion, then to me that sounds like a more sensible way to do things.
It’s a label for the sake of clarity. CNN, Fox, etc should all get it too.
BBC should get it but for UK.
I don't think there would be anything wrong with a transparent listing of all funding sourced for every news organization, but this is something different from that.
It is absolutely true that funding of this kind could "potentially" lead to control or coercion.
how exactly do you think that sort of stuff happens in other countries?
To give two concrete examples of this you can look into the 7th Floor Group and Operation Mockingbird.
LOL. Considering that NPR/PBS receives money from pledge drives, that’s a long list indeed.
They are not technically state-affiliated as they don't take orders from the state, but are in effect state-aligned in all the ways that matter.
It's ideological alignment. To be more precise you could say they are ideologically-affiliated with the establishment elite.
NPR, as it happens, has run many stories that seemed aligned with the right or the left, depending on the subject. They're generally pro-military and pro-wealth, while being against racism and censorship, so it's not as if they're either all left-wing or all right-wing.
It's nowhere on the level of some countries but it's not exactly an independent media outlet and we shouldn't pretend it is.
I'm not saying you owe $billionaire better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Well first, we don’t exactly have wholesale government purges at the federal level. Second, how is it inaccurate to say NPR is affiliated with the government? It is.
Methinks the real reason behind the outrage is because the original use of the “state affiliated” label on Twitter was to give a subtle “watch out, these guys are probably spewing propaganda!” warning. Much the same way that the blue checkmarks are ostensibly “we’ve verified that this person is who they say they are” but over time it morphed into a “stamp of approval” for the person.
It’s inaccurate given that the Twitter explicitly defines that label to refer to editorial control, not funding.
This wouldn’t have even been a big deal if Twitter had originally been direct with labeling, instead of trying to hide double meaning within labels that can act as dogwhistles.
Should Twitter as it stands today, apply the label more universally? Sure. But the fact that it didn’t in the past ties back to the original point, that Twitter wanted to label certain outlets as being propaganda mouthpieces while at the same time being able to hide behind “hey, we didn’t say _propaganda_, we just said _state affiliated!_”
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/new-label...
> Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor. State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, will not be labeled.