NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media' | Hacker News Reader

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

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614 pointsdavidbarker1,117 comments

Here's what NPR's own website says about their federal funding:

"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."

"Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)"

"The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution."

"Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism—especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities."

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

That excerpt isn't about their funding. The CPB funds (in part) public radio stations.

Many of those public radio stations purchase NPR-produced content. (And from other similar providers like American Public Media (Marketplace), PRX (This American Life), etc.)

NPR's customers can't afford NPR's offerings without said Federal funding, which is why NPR's particularly interested in it.

An agency that is federally funded through 1 layer of intermediaries is still, in the most practical sense, federally funded.

As the article indicates, those stations receive an average of 8% from CPB, and 5% from Federal/state/local government. The other 87% comes from elsewhere - 43% of it as individual donations.

If they're "government funded" as a result, slap the label on Walmart and McDonalds. They can't operate without Federal funding, either. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

Are you suggesting that Walmart and McDonald's receive more in government subsidies than they pay in taxes?

I'm suggest Walmart similarly benefits from indirect Federal funding of their business, in the form of wages/benefits they don't have to give out to their employees receiving public assistance to be able to live.

Yes, probably. Not only does Walmart receive significant wage and benefit subsidies for its employees, but they also receive income from customers using food stamps. In 2014 that food stamp spending was estimated to be $13 billion, far more than they pay in taxes.

- https://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big...

By this logic there would so many companies that are "federally funded" that the label itself would become irrelevant.

Including SpaceX. Starlink is a cute and a useful consumer product, but most of their balance sheet is defense money or giving rides to nasa.

You could chuck most of Musk's portfolio into that category TBH. What ever company does that dumb tunnel idea and Tesla are the two additional companies that come to mind.

Does the federal government assert editorial control over NPR?

It doesn't matter in the slightest if they do this explicitly. NPR would be stupid to bite the hand that feeds it.

NPR gets 1% of funding directly from the government.

13% of the 31% (4%) they get from member stations comes from the government, for a total of 5%.

The "hand that feeds" NPR is mostly corporate sponsors and member stations' listeners.

39% of NPR revenue comes directly from corporations.

Another 12% comes from foundations (the wealthy donor class).

Only 31% of their revenue comes from member stations and only 13% of that comes from CPB or government sources, which totals up to 4% coming from the government.

So corporate interests fund NPR more than 10x times as much as the government.

Then why did NPR have a ton of content on their website about how absolutely critical federal funding was to their operation?

Because they don't want liberals thinking too hard about how much Archer Daniels Midland pays them.

And threats to their federal funding are also probably great for their pledge drives.

Scroll up the thread; your question is already answered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35542645

Federal funding isn't critical to NPR, but it's important to the public radio ecosystem of small local stations, who get ~13% of their funding from government.

So evidently NPR disagrees with the "it's just a small percentage, who cares" judgement (until that judgment being on their website becomes embarrassing)

"We don't want our customers being unable to afford our products" is, I suspect, a common opinion among businesses. I'm not sure why you'd find it surprising.

Walmart wants people to spend their food stamps on their groceries. Tesla wants people to use the EV tax credits on their cars. They don't get accused of being government controlled because of it.

So NPR never criticizes the government?

Does that include Fox News when the Ad Council buys ads? Or when cable companies accept infrastructure subsidies?

That would make probably almost all businesses in the US federally funded, as the US government is the single largest employer of people, and those people spend their money at private businesses. The US government purchases things from private businesses.

Come on.

Yeah? Lockheed Martin could be reasonably described as "federally funded".

Sure, but then what's the point of bringing it up at all?

Because that's what the thread is about? If twitter marked lockheed as "government funded organization" I would not care

That funding page says 31% of NPR's revenue comes from programming fees from member stations. Some of the 8% "other revenues" and 5% "PRSS contract" sound like they may come from member stations too, so let's call it 40% total from member stations as a best guess.

Member stations themselves receive 13% of their revenue from the CPB (8%) and "federal, state, and local governments" (5%). Let's call that piece about 10% as a best guess of the federal-only part.

40% from member stations, which themselves get 10% from the Feds, is 4% additional from the Feds, bringing up NPR's federal revenue from the 1% they said to an all-in total of 5%.

It seems that NPR's statement is a bit misleading, but not that materially so.

(I'm as surprised as many of you may be, readers -- I thought they were much more federally funded as well.)

My accounting skills are less than amateur, so please point out anything I may have missed. I'm not quite sure if 40% of 10% computation is a sound representation of what's going on.

Those member stations choose to spend that money on NPR content. They are under no obligation (aside from standing contracts) to continue to give that money to NPR in the future. They could opt to license programming from other sources.

That's like saying a federal employee who chooses to donate some of their income to NPR is giving them government funding.

I agree to some extent, but when the federal government is funding similar organizations with a similar mission, they have a strong incentive to work together. Public radio stations are operated and listened to by the kind of people who like NPR programming.

It's more like a federal employee who works for NPR and believes in NPR's mission donating to NPR. Yes, it's not compulsory, but the money is flowing towards entities with closely related missions that have a strong incentive to cooperate.

But again, I agree with you that the voluntary nature of the cooperation makes it quite different from merely some kind of shell game.

There is also this part that you did not quote:

>On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.

It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.

They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence.

This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.

Can you name any media company being truly independent? Or is any owner excluded from the potential list of dependencies?

I'm discussing government independence specifically, not whether companies are beholden to someone else.

Obviously all businesses are beholden to someone. Yes you should always have an interest in what/who companies are beholden to.

There's a reason Nike and Apple don't chastise the Chinese government.

Twitter is funny in this regard, why is Musk so keen on Russia and China?

To call NPR state-affiliated media to abuse the term to the point of incoherence. You may as well, by your own logic, say every media company ultimately has at least one dollar that's passed through the government and is thus state-affiliated. Thus they all deserve the label. Thus the label is meaningless, which incidentally, appears to be the point of this authoritarian-apolgistic nonsense.

It's continued abuse of language in the hopes of making it impossible for people to determine what's true -- in the hopes of making people give up even caring about facts.

I like how, nowhere in that entire two paragraphs were you able to explain why it's not state-affiliated when its funded by the government. All you did was try to shove the label off because other media is possibly also funded the same way.

I’ve left a number of comments on this thread arguing why this is not a reasonable comparison and so have other people. And you specifically were bringing up the topic of funding, so I was avoiding going off the rails too much.

If I have understood you correctly you were concerned by funding being cut off. Why would that not be a concern with other media, not receiving any government funds, as well? I also do not really understand why you are more concerned with government dependencies than with any other dependencies. Actually I think the latter dependencies might be the stronger influence on a media company, especially if it is a large part of the budget.

That could apply to a huge portion of all businesses on Twitter. How many of the F500 have benefitted from a gov't bailout or some other taxpayer subsidy. No one is really squeaky clean on this front.

Most F500 companies aren’t media companies, and the interests motivating any public statements they make are well understood by the public.

How many media companies got PPP loans? Probably all of them, right?

This is an excellent point. If you review my comment history I think you’ll find some of my most downvoted comments being about how rolling out the biggest infringements upon civil liberties since WWII, and then creating a financing program that media companies rely upon to survive, was one of the most corrupt things I’d seen during my life time.

Well, maybe.

They do. If after 50 years of existence you can't come up with a single example of government interference then they're independent.

NPR continuing to publish programming critical of Trump during the Trump presidency, is a pretty strong indication they have editorial independence.

Heck, Voice of America also did the same and they are definitely state affiliated.

not necessarily. It just means it's not as bad as it would be in China or Russia.

NPR knew the democrats would be back in power in a couple of years...they weren't risking much by being anti-Trump. But they did gain goodwill from the democrats, which can extend them support every time they are in power.

I am not arguing for or against either side, I am just pointing out a flaw in your logic.

I think NPR is so solidly on the democrats side, that it's hard to distinguish what came first: the chicken or the egg?

> I am not arguing for or against either side, I am just pointing out a flaw in your logic.

I do not see a flaw in their logic:

> NPR continuing to publish programming critical of Trump during the Trump presidency, is a pretty strong indication they have editorial independence.

That is a strong indicator. An indicator that may not convince everyone by itself, but I do not see any flaw in their logic.

Threats were made by the Trump admin when NPR had unfavorable reporting.

'Trump proposes eliminating federal funding for PBS, NPR' https://thehill.com/homenews/media/373434-trump-proposes-eli...

They've clearly stepped it up after his term, so, no not really.

Besides the fact that they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government the bigger issue is that of editorial control and NPR is pretty clean as far as I can see. Unlike most of the other entities labeled 'State Affiliated Media'.

Naming NPR in one breath with those others is intentionally tarnishing them and playing to the crowd, which is something that Elon has been engaging in in a very specific manner since he took over Twitter. Trying to suggest that this is appropriate is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people jumping in to defend Musk in the most weird ways.

I don't see Tesla's account labelled as State Affiliated and yet, if we were to judge solely by the amount of funds received they would qualify long before NPR would.

If the public funding isn’t important to them, then don’t take it and become truly independent. Or keep the funding and be open about it.

I suspect most of NPR's followers are fine with their public funding, it's literally in the name. They're probably more upset about all their corporate funding.

Tesla’s funding is neither here nor there; it’s not a news outlet.

NPR needs money and they need editorial freedom, they seem to have both. I really can't fault them for that, editorial independence is the yardstick by which media should be judged unless there is outright ownership.

Money can be easily tracked. Editorial independence cannot be.

I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been. They know member donations are their biggest funding source, so they largely tell their audience what they want to hear.

Put another way, I don't think perfect editorial independence exists. Everyone knows where their bread is being buttered. Having a badge on Twitter saying you're independent would be entirely a judgement call.

> I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been.

Not even close from my outsider perspective.

> I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been.

I... don't know. When the topic comes up there sure are a lot of us NPR listeners who are in rather a love-hate relationship with it, leaning toward "hate". Half the time I'm listening I'm shaking my head at how very self-parody-like NPR they're being or yelling at them to stop doing such shitty coverage. Like, the best news on my local station, far and away, is when they rebroadcast BBC content. If I could tune into actual BBC stations when driving, I'd probably listen to that a lot more than NPR. These days especially, NPR's only got a very-few programs I'd bother to save from a fire, as it were, or that I even might go out of my way to listen to when not in the car.

It's just that there's not a lot of better news/commentary/talk programming on the radio dial.

I agree, but in many ways it's a product of syndication. When you get out of that influence (e.g., independently published podcasters) the scope of quality becomes _much_ broader.

I'm old enough to remember finding good-quality content on NPR, but I now look toward podcasts in the special interest I'm looking for to find good-quality audio-streamed information.

State funding of media, regardless of how it’s structured, creates an obvious conflict of interest with editorial freedom. Theoretically it’s possible for a state funded media company to exercise editorial freedom, just like it would be theoretically possible for a climate study funded by ExxonMobile to exercise academic freedom, but not without acknowledging that the conflict of interest exists. Maybe they are a high integrity organisation, but the existence of this conflict of interest isn’t really up for debate. Maybe it’s not necessary for any state funded media to be labelled on Twitter, but if you’re going to label any of it, then you should label all of it.

The NPR makes no secret of its funding. But stamping a label on it like this implies that they are at the same level as the Chinese and Russian official state channels and lapdog institutions, which is the effect that Musk is going for here, which clearly is unfair to the NPR.

Any attempt to whitewash even aspects of it is in part giving credit to it and I'm just not going to carry Musk's water on this. It's a petty move by a petty person, who uses the platform that he bought to further his new best buddies interests by fomenting distrust in media institutions that he can't buy or control.

NPR has exactly the same conflict of interest in regards to funding that RT has. You can make your own judgements about how influential that conflict is for different outlets, but the existence of it cannot be denied. If you think labelling the conflict of interest is worthwhile (as other social media platforms also do), then you have to do it for all outlets that have it. Otherwise you’re revealing that you’re actually pursing some other alternative agenda.

Personally I think it’s a stupid idea in general. But that’s because I’m against any organisation attempting to establish itself as an authority over the concept of the truth.

> NPR has exactly the same conflict of interest in regards to funding that RT has.

Sorry, but that is factually incorrect.

Media companies receiving public funding is a conflict of interest with editorial independence, both RT and NPR receiving public funding. These are facts.

The fact is that the one is a state sponsored mouthpiece and the other is a editorially independent organization.

If you have proof that the NPR is a mouthpiece for the US government then now would be a fine time to provide it, otherwise it is just trying to throw shade in the exact same way that Elon Musk is trying to.

There are many reasons other than funding to criticize RT, but RT and NPR have the same conflict of interested created by their funding sources. If you’re not able to appreciate this very simple fact then I would highly suggest you engage in some self-reflection.

Funding doesn't have to be a conflict of interest depending on how it's organised. But Twitter's own definition of "state affiliated media" is not about funding, but about editorial control, where NPR is independent. Labeling NPR as "state affiliated" is clearly wrong according to Twitter's own definition.

NPR is not Stars and Stripes, Voice of America or even the BBC. Assuming 4% in direct government funding (from all levels) as estimated elsewhere in the thread, plus some amount in government subsidization of donations to a registered non-profit; the fiscal contributions from government is meaningful, but not sufficient to assume it biases coverage.

Stars and Stripes has a mix of funding, including about half its budget from the department of defense, but has editorial independence; although I imagine it's hard not to be influenced.

Even Voice of America has safeguards for editorial independence, although its budget is fully state funded.

> State funding of media, regardless of how it’s structured, creates an obvious conflict of interest with editorial freedom.

How is this not true of any funding of media?

At least with government funding—even if there is outright editorial control—in a democratic country, you as a citizen have the ability to vote on how you think that funding and control should be exercised. Furthermore, it is massively easier to get laws in place that mandate transparency for government-funded entities than for private ones, so whatever influences there may be on their reporting would be much more visible.

The concern that media companies can have interests that don’t align with journalistic integrity does apply to any media company. Whenever you see Rupert Murdoch’s name being discussed, it’s probably in relation to this topic. However it is harmful in a unique way when the government creates a conflict of interest between editorial independence, and serving the states agenda, due to the way in which that undermines the principle that a democratic society requires freedom of the press.

put a better way, theoretically it's possible for an entity that has received a small amount of funds from the state, to be controlled by that state, just like SpaceX, which is state funded, could be controlled by that state, and just like theoretically I could give you a dollar and then control you, but any actual accusation of such or implication thereof would need actual evidence behind it, or else such conspiracy theories based only on incentives and no evidence can be dismissed out of hand.

No evidence of bias is required to establish that a conflict of interest exists. One reason that people are interested in knowing when a conflict of interest exists, is that is generally not possible to prove what influences are motivating decision making.

evidence of bias is required to establish bias, even if there's the appearance of a conflict of interest, which given the miniscule amount of funding in question here, doesn't even seem to be the case, either.

many conspiracy theorists will say that it's impossible to prove their conspiracy theory (in this case, any actual bias), but that's their problem, not the world's

maybe they can spend more time interviewing, investigating, doing statistical analysis, etc to find any evidence of their conspiracy theories, and less time just coming up with the theories?

I’m not alleging any bias. I’m stating that the funding model creates a conflict of interest, which is simply factually correct.

> given the miniscule amount of funding in question here, doesn't even seem to be the case

According to NPR themselves, federal funding is essential for their ongoing existence.

> Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.

> The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

if there is no bias, there is no issue, even if there is the appearance of a conflict of interest, which given the small portion of funding in question here, there doesn't even seem to be

I’m not alleging there is no bias either. The reason that managing conflicting interests is important in the first place is because it’s not possible to objectively measure their influence.

There is also not an “appearance” of conflicting interests here. There is factually a conflicting interest between relying on an entity for funding, and an expectation that you’ll provide impartial media coverage of them.

This exists regardless of how small you think this reliance is. But even then, your attempt to minimise it is directly contradicted by NPR, who claim it is “essential” to their ability to operate.

I'm not alleging that you're alleging that there's no bias either, but either you have convincing evidence there is, or we fall back to there not being any until you do (and your claims that the conspiracy theory is impossible to prove are unconvincing, many conspiracy theorists say the same thing)

As for your opinion about how much of a conflict of interest or appearance thereof, if you trust NPR as a reliable source on this matter, then we can trust them also saying they have editorial independence (read: no bias)

your assertions of an expectation are similarly unconvincing, it's literally just you claiming as such, when others recognize that, like I can receive a dollar and not be controlled by the giver, so can NPR

It's not up to them, the 4% of their revenue that comes from federal funds comes to them through member station payments. They don't control the member stations or how they are funded.

Also, how could they be any more open about this? If you listen to any NPR member station you'll hear an acknowledgement of federal funds like once an hour.

I am not sure what you mean by them being open about it. Looks to me that they are open about the funding they get. Them getting grants to service communities that are not profitable doesn't mean that they take marching orders from Washington.

I feel like you're acting in bad faith conflating "public" and "state" in this instance. Wikipedia is an apt comparison that receives the vast majority of its funding through donations. It has received grants, but it's not "state run media" at all.

If the bar for being state affiliated is receiving money from the federal government, then I'm sure every news outlet and business of reasonable size qualifies (especially after the PPP loans).

> they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government

There are at least two ways they get government funding:

- direct funding from the federal government

- payment from member stations (at least 31% of revenue) who are themselves supported by government funding

Without looking at the funding sources of each NPR member station, it's hard to come up with a good estimate, but it's probably a double digit percentage, which exceeds what I consider 'tiny'.

Yes, and this gives their funders editorial control how?

I was so surprised by the first statement in your comment, that I stopped reading right there, and searched online to see if I could confirm/deny the statement. Then I wrote a reply without reading the rest of your comment.

I didn't say anything about editorial control.

That's the thing that matters. The funding isn't relevant, but making a ruckus about the funding is the tool through which Musk has plausible deniability that this was ever about editorial control. It is factually correct but conveys no information other than misdirection and you are falling for it hook, line and sinker. NPR has a lot of staffers, want to bet that at least a number of them have prior government employment on their CVs? Want to bet that some of them will leave NPR for government? That too would be utterly irrelevant, but you could make a nice argument about it and maybe even prove it to be factually correct. In the end it's all just noise and no signal.

State affiliated media are those media institutions that are editorially controlled by the nation state where they are based, and funding is secondary to that by a very large distance.

> you are falling for it hook, line and sinker

I haven't made any statement (nor drawn any conclusion) about whether NPR's content is controlled or influenced by any level of government. So I'm not sure what I've fallen for?

I've only talked about funding. That may be irrelevant, but I only talked about it in response to something you brought up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The whole point is that this discussion is the result of a label that is applied maliciously, focusing on the label and/or the accuracy of the label misses the point: the label should not have been applied because historically it has been applied on entities that are vastly different from the NPR. So now you have to wonder why it was applied, instead of trying to figure out if it applies or not.

> So now you have to wonder why it was applied, instead of trying to figure out if it applies or not.

Now the question is whether you are willing to apply the same analysis to Twitter's decision to apply its "Hacked Materials Policy" in 2020 in order to block any discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

See other comments on exactly that subject in this thread.

Really, it's a bit like 'but her emails' or 'Benghazi' at this point. Let's not pollute HN, shall we?

Asking this question is the only way of determining whether a person is acting from a truly principled position, or whether they are using situational ethics.

The only true principle is one that binds your allies and your opponents equally. If it only applies to your opponents, then it's merely a rationalization.

I'm interested in finding like-minded people who are committed to applying principles equally. It's the only way of mediating conflict that does not devolve into pure tribalism. Unfortunately few people seem to be interested.

I think you will find that dragging in unrelated subjects isn't going to help make your argument because you are trying to find purchase on the individuals that you are talking to rather than to discuss the subject matter.

Applying principles equally implies that the subjects are comparable, which may be the case in your world view but you will find that your worldview rarely if ever overlaps the worldview of another person. So instead of trying to match worldviews we discuss topics individually of each other so that there is room for less than 100% black/white differentiation. Given two subjects that two people may or may not agree on there will be four populations of results given a large enough sample size. Whether you believe that those people are able to rationally apply their own principles or not isn't really the question the question is whether they believe that they are doing so and cherry picking your subjects doesn't give you more grip on their worldview, it only serves to reinforce your own.

It sounds like you don't think anyone should ever have to defend the question of why they apply different standards to different cases.

Suppose we have two warring factions that both constantly accuse each other of wrongs that they also commit. How do we escape the cycle of escalation?

> How do we escape the cycle of escalation?

By looking at each case individually. Rules are fun to make but tend to not work as soon as things get a bit more complicated. That's why we don't just have laws but also judges.

Judges do the opposite of looking at each case individually. The overriding principle of common law jurisdictions is stare decisis, which is to apply principles consistently according to precedent.

For my part, I look at this as an iterated prisoner's dilemma. I want to live in a society that values fairness and equal protection above all, even when that means conceding things that I would prefer not to concede if I was acting in pure self-interest.

I'll be honest, at a base level it amuses me to see Twitter label NPR as "Government-funded media," and to see NPR get mad about it. But because I want to live in a fair society, I'm willing to set that base feeling aside, and take really seriously the question of whether this is truly fair or merely the petty and arbitrary actions of an unprincipled billionaire.

But this deal only works if the other side is willing to do the same. And I have seen too many rounds of this iterated prisoner's dilemma where the other side is happy to take the W when it benefits them.

If I ally with the people criticizing Musk, but those same people are not willing to cooperate in pursuit of fairness when power benefits them, then I am in the loser quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. No thanks.

So unless I see critics of Musk appeal to general principles that they are willing to stand up for, across the board, I just get out my popcorn and enjoy the show.

The only reason in theory for a place to put a "state media" label is to imply the State has editorial control.

it sounds, then, that you'd agree with an accurate compromise:

"receives a small amount of funding from the federal government but maintains editorial independence"

all true, so better than the current label

yes

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.)

You should look into their origin story if you want an answer. And no, Govt-Funded is also not fair absent an indication of editorial control. The BBC in the UK, the NOS in NL, NPR in the United States, and so on are all official channels but they also have their own editorial staff and only in very rare cases does the government directly intervene in the production (and usually simultaneously on other channels as well). So this is simply Elon playing stupid games, which he seems to be very good at.

NPR was created after the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 aiming to increase public education through media, which doesn't really answer my question.

> Govt-Funded is also not fair absent an indication of editorial control

But they're govt-funded. BBC is too.

They get this source of funding because that is how they were created and entities that were created through a different mechanism (for instance: to become the mouthpiece for a political stream or for commercial reasons) are a different kind of animal.

The government allocates funds to many things that it may consider useful, such as health care, infrastructure and education. This does not necessarily imply that the government does this to create a mechanism of influence, as opposed to their counterparts in countries that are run as dictatorships. Naming the NPR in the same breath as the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean state media is mistaken at best and maliciously dishonest at worst. Knowing what I know about Musk it is a fair bet we're looking at the latter.

It should be under the same label as BBC, just govt-funded. Up to you what you think of that. State-affiliated means definite editorial control. Syria etc call those outlets education too.

And I'm pretty sure they'd have been fine with that, however, the BBC label reads 'Publicly funded media', not 'Government funded'.

"Publicly-funded" is fine too.

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 million segments on this. It's interesting stuff. Easy to learn about!

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?

No I'm referring to them having open discussions about their logic for continuing to receive funding. They don't really do "explanations" with regards to their own operations, general it is a discussion about what is going on. They are a pretty transparent organization.

You'll be more persuasive you actually answer his question instead of further casting aspersions.

I don't have evidence of federal editorial control over NPR, nor does anyone have evidence of the absence, which is why I say that only "govt-funded" is a fair label.

If I'm giving you a regular flow of money that keeps you well fed and housed in a nice area, you're going to at least subconsciously care about how I perceive you and if I approve of the things you're doing, because I have the power to cut off that flow of money at any time.

This is why many wealthy individuals and organizations donate to both political parties. The implicit threat of losing a flow of money you've become accustomed to is more powerful that the vague promise of a new flow of money that you can currently live without.

Old money and power don't control things with a loud command, but with a subtle flash of facial displeasure.

Show how the NPR is pulling their punches when they report on the Federal government and I'll consider it. But from where I'm sitting - far outside of the USA - they offer some of the most balanced and clean reporting out there (and that includes the BBC).

I agree with your perception. There are many within the US that simply have a different window of what they find to be acceptable sources, topics, and opinions to entertain. The word 'balanced' implies a sort of central tendency, which can vary depending on what someone finds worthy of consideration.

They aren’t even slightly balanced anymore, especially their radio stuff. They took a hard turn left after Trump was nominated. They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. I didn’t hear a single positive thing about anything the Trump administration did during his presidency, only after the last election. You can’t turn on your local station without hearing some identity politics within a few minutes - either from them or NPR itself. They often only have one “side” being interviewed for their reporting.

It just so happens that Republicans want to pull their funding and Democrats don’t. That’s a bit of a chicken or the egg type situation.

It’s sad because they used to be pretty good, and were probably the last bastion of somewhat balanced reporting in our country.

So you thought they were pretty good until Trump came along and then they did a hard left? Have you considered the possibility that they didn't change at all and that their reporting was on the money?

People that urgently want to believe the Hunter Biden laptop story was somehow relevant tend to be hardliner Trump supporters and I find it hard to see how if that is their perspective they could be convinced that Trump has been a disaster for US politics if they haven't come to that conclusion on their own by now.

Think about it: Republicans want to pull their funding. Why would that be? Because they are reporting the facts and that is inconvenient to them? Or for some non-partisan reason that I'm currently unaware of? There is this quote by Colbert: "Reality has a left wing bias" or something to that effect. NPR reporting leans 'left' only if you are far to the right of center. For the rest of the world - me included - it is still center or center right depending on the context.

Republicans have been wanting to pull their funding for 60 years because they don't think taxpayers should be funding it.

They should not be receiving public funds if they are going to continue to produce ideologically inclined content. At this point, they are no different than a little neoliberal/progressive think tank. And an honest assessment of the content means that they lean heavily to the left.

I'm far from a Trump supporter - I don't consider myself to be a republican or a democrat. I like some policies from one side and some from the other, and I think in a lot of instances (like abortion) a compromise would be best instead of fully one way or the other.

I think Trump getting elected made a lot of people on the left that felt they had some "power" over elections feel like they somehow failed. Keep in mind how scared they were. This American Life did a show on how Trump could basically launch nukes whenever he wanted, for instance. We had years of "Russian collusion." Suddenly it became their mission to not only ensure it didn't happen again, but their opinion of republicans radically shifted.

If you can't tell that NPR is hard on the left then it's you who is off of the charts politically. The way they've treated the Trump administration vs the Biden administration is absolutely laughable.

This is all anecdotal, but this one hits home for me. As a longtime NPR supporter well before the 2016 election, I wholeheartedly agree with all your comments. There was a drastic change leading up to that 2016 mess. We shouldn't forget the comment section was shut down in 2015 as well. An abstraction layer was added to it as a solution, but it really seemed to take away from the site as there were a lot of great discussions and debates taking place.

I'm fairly anti-Trump myself, but he never lived in my head rent free - a spade is a spade. The bias can be heard within minutes of tuning in, which I still do every time I'm in the car. I treat it just like I do CNN or Fox, which is with a grain of salt.

All that being said, there is still a lot of really awesome content coming from them. This American Life is still one of my all time favorites.

> They took a hard turn left after Trump was nominated.

This would seemingly support that they are less than state controlled; The idea that the executive branch, the senate majority, and the house majority would be criticized by a state sponsored media in recent history suggests independence.

If Side A has wanted to defund you for decades and Side B, and you always paint Side A in a negative light and Side B in a positive...

They aren't controlled by either party but I doubt that doesn't have an influence on their reporting.

Have you ever happened to think that maybe everything Trump did was awful and un-American, and hence it was reported on ACCURATELY?

Truly amazing how Conservatives always claim bias instead of stopping and thinking "Are we the assholes?"

Every political administration in the history of forever has had good policies and bad policies.

He did a lot as far as medical pricing, forcing hospitals to have price transparency. Medications were also supposed to have pricing listed on their commercials - and did for a short while. It looks like the courts blocked it, from a quick Google. Regardless of whether you think tax cuts are a good thing, increasing the standard deduction made tax season a lot easier for many people.

Personally I think clamping down on illegal immigration is a good thing, though some may disagree. I've literally never heard one single word from NPR about any negatives from unchecked illegal immigration, but many, many, many sob stories from the other direction.

So, there's some examples. I find that most people that hate a politician mostly do it because they're on the wrong side. My wife's parents and sister were just railing against Desantis, even though they probably know very few of his policies as we're on the other side of the country - and what they do know are probably one-sided things from their preferred news sources.

And Hitler was a vegetarian. No amount of supposed "good" outweighs the absolute evil of the man. The same applies to Trump. The man is out-and-out Anti-American and is almost literally the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. I don't give a crap if her personally saved 1000 puppies from dying in a fire. It doesn't outweigh the rest of his actions.

> They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Because reporting on bullshit doesn't make you balanced. Balance isn't being in the middle of extremes, especially when the mainstream of politics in America for one party has gone off the rails.

discussing incentives is understandable (even though your analogy doesn't fit because the government's minor funding isn't what's keeping NPR funded)

suggesting that actual impropriety or improper influence occurs as a result is a conspiracy theory, and we'd need to see actual evidence that it actually happened to avoid dismissing it out of hand

I think if you study this and read up on, for example, the Trump administration's attempts to turn VoA into a compliant propaganda outfit via the administration's control of USAGM, you might conclude that it's actually really hard to manipulate public media in this way. It's not a perfect system but it's pretty well designed.

Why not just look at the NPR page we're discussing, which says 13% of public radio station revenue is from federal funds? 13% of 31% is 4%.

Edit: The 13% is from all government funds, not just federal.

Because not all government funding is federal funding.

Random example from an NPR member station's web site:

  KCRW is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture. The Department's Organizational Grant Program helps fund a wide variety of arts, culture, and music programs that you hear on air each day!

I apologize for my imprecise language. The 13% I quoted includes "Federal, state and local governments". Again this is all on the web page we're all discussing, in a very easy-to-understand chart.

NPR has a history of downplaying their government funding, I'm not sure if you should use them as your main source. I know in the past they've said it was around 5%, while independent investigations found it was closer to 20-40%

That's the source we're discussing here. If you have some evidence that they're lying about this then please post it, I would genuinely be interested to see it.

Thank you for the number. In context, the EU is 15% of revenue for most ad based tech platforms, and its regulation has shown unbounded control over them.

>- payment from member stations (at least 31% of revenue) who are themselves supported by government funding

I have a hard time understanding this as "state sponsored", much less as evidence that NPR has ceded editorial control. NPR estimates (and InfluenceWatch believes this estimate) that about 4% of their revenue ultimately comes from federal, state and local governments [0], via direct grants to NPR, and via grants to member stations that are in turn paid to NPR. InfluenceWatch, you'll note, is run by the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank which has an axe to grind about NPR's apparent left-wing bias.

This feels a lot like the accusations against Bellingcat that they are state-sponsored/controlled. And I think those accusations are equally specious. Accepting money via indirect grants is not at all the same as accepting payment for invoiced work.

0. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-ra...

Indeed. Meanwhile, the message has had its intended effect and NPR is now seen as 'tainted' by the people who would do a lot better to listen more to NPR than to various other far more biased news sources. It's the same old playbook, and Musk getting away with this is highly annoying.

It's still federally funded.

Twitter probably shouldn't have gotten into labeling who is and isn't state funded, but if they are, US/UK/NATO orgs should be fair game alongside the Russians and Chinese.

NPR labeling the "state-funded media" claim as "false" when its trivially, factually true is a bad look for them as a fact-based organization.

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

1. "True but we think it's irrelevant" does not equate to "false".

2. "But america are the good guys" is the exact kind of thing you see uniformly from all American media including NPR.

You really believe that NPR and the BBC belong in the same basket as Russian and Chinese state media?

Fish don't know they're in water.

If you've been ingesting a narrative since middle school, and the BBC reinforces it, well that's just good neutral unbiased reporting.

It's always telling when people with narratives to push don't directly answer questions.

I don’t regularly read the BBC or NPR. I have watched the BBC skirmish with government over their independence and it’s an active fight (see Gary Lineker fighter recently, interesting, on Twitter).

Do you see these fights for independence in Chinese and Russian news channels? And do you really think them similar to the BBC and NPR?

You will never, ever see a mainstream western news org demonize the US the way they do to Russia and China routinely.

Are they the exact same? No, but they're not so different when you zoom out. You don't need explicit censorship when you can manufacture consent at the hiring and promotion stages.

Do you think the US, China and Russia similar?

I have a lot of criticism for the US, but the US can at least punish its rulers at the ballot box. The US isn’t chucking journalists out the window or vanishing them on a regular basis. Objectively, it’s hard say the three are similar, as two of those countries deserve more criticism. They are not the same when you zoom out.

I am not an American.

I could criticize or compliment all 3 depending on the topic or my mood.

If we're so much better in the west, maybe we can hold ourselves accountable and question our own biases.

If we are so much worse, why isn’t accountability and criticism a thing in a Russia and China?

Exactly, I have been trying to explain it to people here (Québec/Canada) Here people believe the CBC is an impartial view of reality, it’s through that filter they see all the events of the world.

Information that contradict their narrative become disinformation or conspiration. Or you get labeled racist/transphobe/Trump supporter at the first doubt

Give me little hope for our country at the moment.

It's not that it's impartial or unbiased. It's that it's not an editorial arm for the state. The United States doesn't even have a centralized, consistent state-run party that would exercise consistent pressure on NPR to publish certain stories or frame them in a certain way. It's an absurd comparison to link these to Chinese or Russian state-affiliated media.

NPR being state affiliated is false. NPR being funded by the state is not, but it leads people to believe that it's affiliated with the state, which is false.

Funding is a very important kind of affiliation, I would think.

It could be but it doesn't have to be. That's why editorial independence is a thing. And that's why you'll see broadcasters in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China try their level best not to criticize the ruling party and ruling individuals of the countries that they have their base in because if they did the consequences would likely be much further reaching than those related to funding.

The fact that this needs to be spelled out is a bit sad. One of the first things an editorial board of an actual news service does is to assert its independence, if it can't do that then they will resign in a very public way that leaves no doubt about what is going on.

For instance, the large number of people that resigned from Twitter when Musk took over (and that was besides the ones that he fired because he couldn't get them to do his bidding) made exactly such a statement.

State funded media is a phrase, it has meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words. Wikipedia's 'State media' page seems to have it covered:

> State media or government media are media outlets that are under financial and/or editorial control of the state or government, directly or indirectly. [1]

Even that page makes a distinction between state funded and state media[2], but that is not how youtube[3] or others [4], [5], and I am sure many others[6 time based google] do not make the distinction. For better or worse 'State funded media' is often interchangeable with 'state media' and NPR is not state media even if some of its funds come from the state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media#:~:text=State%20me.... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media#:~:text=Not%20to%2.... [3] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/state-media-wa... [4]https://www.prindleinstitute.org/2019/03/whats-wrong-with-st... [5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/194016122092283... [6] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22State+funded+media%22&rlz...

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

Trustworthy when it is about non-local affairs, hopelessly biased when it is about local affairs. But Al Jazeera doesn't really pretend to be unbiased. Sometimes I'm positively surprised by the quality of their reporting. But them being Qatar based the amount of local news that would affect me is nil. They definitely offer an interesting perspective on the world as seen from the Arabic perspective, meanwhile I'm well aware of the fact that their English language news isn't always a 1:1 with their coverage of the same subject in languages that I can not read unaided.

Replace "Al Jazeera" with "NPR" in your comment and you're also spot on.

Sorry, but aljazeera is on the level of RT. That you think otherwise just shows that you are more willing to ignore a biais when it is in your favor.

It has always been known in the arabic world that AJ is a complete puppet of the Qatari royal family (and even staffed by members of the royal family) and it can't be a coincidence that AJ's coverage is almost always a mirror image of qatari foreign policy talking points/positions. It is the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya, just with more international presence.

Reading comprehension failure on your part, or we're in violent agreement which you somehow chose to voice as disagreement.

The point is that Al Jazeera exhibits a lot of bias on international issues that are relevant to the Qataris, not just local news. This includes US foreign policy, environmental things, and global economic policy. They are basically RT (think about how RT covered george floyd), but generally allied with the west.

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.

What you are saying is that NPR is left-wing, not "controlled by the government".

"controlled by the government" means: left-wing when the government is left-wing, right-wing when the government is right-wing. Was NPR right-wing when Trump was president?

If not, it is the proof that the label "government funded" is really really bad: it does not identify outlets that are biased by their funding, it just find an excuse to label as biased while not labeling as biased others than are as biased.

It does not mean NPR is not biased, but if you want to add a label to warn of a potential bias, you need to do it properly, and label ALL outlets that are similarly biased and identify properly the reason they are.

Funnily, NPR could also drop the 4% of revenue from government funding and continue to publish the same stories with exactly the same bias, and people who are arguing that NPR is biased should therefore argue then that NPR is not biased anymore.

I wasn't arguing that it's controlled by the government. It's somewhat controlled by the democratic party, which is 50% of the time in charge of the government.

I was mainly expanding on the fact that NPR chose to not represent 50% of the US population, and also miss having a chance of being a world class service, like the BBC or Al Jazeera.

I 100% agree that NPR is biased by left-wing ideology.

I don't really agree about "controlled by", that's like asking someone "who have you voted for" and after they said X, then saying "so you don't have any free will, you are just controlled by X". It's ridiculous: it's not because someone agrees with some party that the party controls them.

But being biased is not in itself a problem: every media is biased, only stupid people believe in neutrality. For example, giving 50-50 time to present each side's opinion is not unbiased: in a parallel universe where one side is, by chance, way bigger than the other (which is very easy to obtain as political trends are strongly based on charisma of few people), then, the 50-50 strategy leads to totally different coverage of the situation. The 50-50 strategy is not being neutral, it's being a sell-out that want to please everyone. Another example is these situations where the journalist gives equal share to a person that says "it's currently raining" and a person that says "it's currently sunny" (and, please, avoid "it can be raining and sunny at the same time", obviously, my example corresponds to a situation where it is not the case).

At the end of the day, it's not a problem: you have left-wing media, you have right-wing media, as long as they are not lying and that you don't have a society too stupid to live in an echo chamber, then, citizen are given all the information they need to make their own opinion. And if they are living in their echo chamber, the problem is not the existence of biased media, but a society problem.

But in this discussion, the problem is that the label is not "this company is ideologically biased", but "this company is controlled by the government". You cannot blame me for talking about the subject in question. The question of NPR being left-wing is irrelevant, but pushing this in the discussion is in fact even a problem: like if intellectually dishonest labeling are ok because NPR is left-wing.

NPR political coverage is not controlled by the democrats in the same way that an SPAC is not controlled by the politician it supports.

the claim is trivially and factually false

what are you talking about

Since when did Tesla start producing media? Specifically, media funded by the government? Can you provide proof of this funding and links to what they produced?

This comment is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people who can't help but try to find reasons to dislike Elon, because NPR told them to do so.

There's a bunch of state funded media in Europe, for example Scandinavian, German, UK, etc public service media orgs. They have standards for editorial independence and I think they are just as independent or more, as NPR.

Well Twitter is a private company and can ban/publish who they please under their own terms

Your quoting was rather disingenuous. How could you not quote the last line (regarding how much of their budget comes from this source), when you quoted almost all the rest regarding federal funding?

It would be helpful to add some numbers to your comment. 31% of NPR revenues are from member stations, and 13% of that 31% is federal funding. So ~4% of NPR revenue is indirect federal funds. This is, to give one example, substantially less than the portion of grocery store revenues that come from SNAP. Do we consider all grocery chains to be government sponsored businesses? Is Y Combinator government sponsored, since so many of its investments received money from the SVB bailout?

My answer would be yes, government support is essential for most businesses, but that makes this label useless in theory and malicious in practice when only applied to a tiny subset of government-funded companies.

And this proves they're not government funded / affiliated how?

Didn't they tweet that their funding by the government was so minuscule that they shouldn't be labeled state-affiliated? You cannot simultaneously say that while also declaring you can't exist to your full capacity without government funding.

The irony is that it's likely not minuscule. Although NPR claims its around ~5%, independent investigations usually put it closer to 20-40%

You might compare with a government contractor like SpaceX. Private organizations can depend on government funding without being fully government-controlled. Speaking of SpaceX as a privately owned company is still accurate. Calling it state-affiliated wouldn’t be entirely wrong (they work with NASA), but a bit weird.

In NPR’s case, their customers (public radio stations) receive a lot of government funding, so it’s one step removed compared to a government contractor.

NPR is a nonprofit with a board of directors that includes NPR member station managers, though. Control over NPR seems rather diffuse? Nonprofit boards are often kind of weird that way.

Why are you bring up non-media companies? That label was specifically for media. You know, the ones that are supposed to bring you neutral information.... which is why the label makes more sense for media companies.

Elon's playing word games. When the average person talks about State Affiliated Media they're referring to editorial control. As far as I know NPR has always had editorial control and goes to great lengths to maintain neutrality in their writing. They've certainly screwed up in major ways before, but compared to MSNBC, Fox, the NYT, NYP, and CNN I'd say NPR looks like a saint.

The irony I see here is that Twitter is on record as to being involved in suppression exercises around COVID, where they basically acted as the governments hands to suppress legitimate voices. Given that, Twitter needs to wear its own State Affiliated Media badge. Hell, what do you even call an entity that willfully suppresses valid and good information that is not favorable to the government? A state apologist?

I was going to mention Radio Free Europe as a really good example of egregious, western state-sponsored media, but then on a lark, I looked up how well regarded they are, bias-wise, and now I don't know what to think.

Hey, just want to say thanks for saying that you changed your mind. It's hard to do on public forums and just in general. It's even harder to say that you don;t know something. Thanks for saying this.

Western state-backed media is regarded highly by mainstream Western media watchdogs? You don't say.

That was kind of my read on it, which is what sent me into a tailspin. I ended up questioning all the tools I had to evaluate a source without taking it on as another job.

But it turns out that the difference in bias of RFE and any number of out-and-out propaganda mills is that if a story is inconvenient to RFE's agenda, they'll de-emphasize it. On the other hand, an out-and-out propaganda mill will just make shit up to fit their narrative.

So where I landed was that RFE was ultimately reliable, but subject to the same little human biases as NPR or AP News or the Financial Times, or any number of other sources that I do trust. Their main source of bias is a bit more of an elephant in the room, but if anything, it makes them a bit harder on their masters.

Don’t worry about the watchdogs. You can just read the content to see. It’s true they’re interested in human rights news, and authoritarian countries don’t look good on that subject. But the content is factual, and their reporters work at great risk.

Don’t worry about the watchdogs. Just read the content. It’s true that RFE/RL focuses on human rights and democracy, and authoritarian countries don’t look very good in those categories. But the reporting is factual, and their reporters run great risks. Several are in jail in Belarus, Russia, etc.

Turns out many democratic systems actually like politically neutral media that inform the public in the way they need to be informed in order to function in a democratic system. Healthy democratic governments abhor propaganda.

At least as of the time of this comment, no special label was applied to Stars and Stripes (50% funded by the US Department of Defense), Al Hurra (100% funded by the US Agency for Global Media), or CBC (>50% funded by the Canadian government).

Maybe that's just a mistake, and every news organization that gets a dollar of funding from any government will eventually get its own "Government-funded Media" label. Or maybe Twitter's new owner is being a petty little despot and didn't like a recent NPR story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, every organization when faced with potential budget cuts refers to all of their budget as "essential". This should not be surprising.

I love that people are trying to coat his actions in reason like "look at the numbers, it's not spite it's truth" and then Elon tweets "Defund @NPR" and makes them look silly.

Good. It's clear now that Twitter is just an information control mechanism for Musk, and journalists should quit their addiction to it. I think every major news outlet should have their own ActivityPub compatible service, essentially as a modern replacement for RSS.

with ActivityPub you can have specific actors like @breaking@npr.org, @sports@npr.org, @finance@npr.org, @waitwaitdonttellme@npr.org, @reporter@npr.org, et cetera.

for some reason I'm annoyed by all the @ symbols in these new things

it was annoying to me to type it too! There are also webfinger URLs that serve the same purpose like https://mastodon.social/@gargron == @gargron@mastodon.social

That's not a WebFinger URL. WebFinger URLs point to /.well-known/ path that returns a JSON document with links to other places for the user. To simplify WebFinger use by a human, we introduced acct:user@example.com syntax. And (at least my) WebFinger clients can assume the acct: part, much like email clients do for the email: scheme.

Yah, the one thing that I like about bluesky is their name-spacing: “sports.npr.org”

We are coming full circle back to Usenet.

I like the Matrix format, "@user:domain.tld"

I prefer the email format: user@domain.tld. There's no reason that can't be used for social media.

what's the reason for the initial @ symbol, seems superfluous

So it doesn't get mistaken for an email address.

It's on Mastodon though, the automatic linking wouldn't add mailto: at the front, think it's worth the cost of a few people not being able to post their email address without a mailto:

Referencing one of these username handles in external CMS systems (news sites, blogs, etc) might automatically convert them in Rich Text editors, or just Word processors, or even operating system toolings. Seems worth not re-using the same URI format.

I would guess so that people don't confuse it with an email address

It originated organically on Twitter as early users wrote “at” each other. Following that Twitter formally adopted it, and Mastodon imitated Twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mention_(blogging)#@_(at_sign)

Within Mastodon’s UI usernames are typically displayed as just e.g. @breaking, avoiding the visual noise of multiple at signs.

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.

I suspect this is a bad-faith argument, but just to be clear, NPR get's a tiny fraction of its funding from the government *and* maintains editorial independence.

> The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Being free of direct government funding does not make it free from editorial independence. You can listen and get an idea of their underwriting. They're clear to walk the line around a lot of topics to not upset their corporate and non profit overlords. We live in a corporatocracy and these companies and non profits are revolving doors for regulatory capture through lobbying and other methods.

If you really want to delve into how, where, and whom makes the news I suggest start by looking at the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters

> They're clear to walk the line around a lot of topics to not upset their corporate and non profit overlords.

That's true for virtually all news organization - public or private. NPR is not an outlier in this regard.

A significant percentage of NPR member station funding is from individual donations, NPR is obviously also very conscious about producing the type of content its audience expects. No media outlet on planet earth is free from the influence of its audience.

Editorial independence from government funding.

what percentage of NPR’s true funding was from the government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

I'm seeing about ~10% from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which if I'm reading correctly is itself primarily funded by Federal grants.

Yeah I'm sure it has nothing to do with months of the CEO putting out right wing agitprop and promoting QAnon conspiracies. He openly promoted GOP candidates on his media site.

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 just being naive)

The label was "State Affiliated" not "publicly funded".

As long as Twitter lists itself as a Qatari/Saudi backed social media company I suppose fair is fair and at least they are being consistent in how they apply the rules. I wonder if they will do so.

Not that rss really needs replacing - in fact using both is a great experience

> Twitter is just an information control mechanism for Musk, and journalists should quit

agreed. That was the case long before Musk.

Would you have felt comfortable articulating that opinion, two years ago? When anything but Twitter was "an extremist echo chamber"? When the only censorship they were indulging in was the censorship we still can't talk about?

>Would you have felt comfortable articulating that opinion, two years ago?

I posted rather often about how awful Twitter was long before there was a whiff of Musk buying it. (It's still awful.) I didn't really talk about "information control", but I don't care about that now, either; Twitter's audience was never that big.

Twitter was also an extremist echo chamber. It's how the January 6th insurrection happened, a violent attack on the US Capitol that was organized, launched, and coordinated in real-time on Twitter. You can't do that if voices of sanity are seeping in. It's just that Twitter as many echo chambers, some bigger and more dangerous than others.

Email remains undefeated as the original, indestructible, federated social network. It's a shame about the flub with Google Buzz, that could've been the basis for something great.

Too bad it's so centralized now.

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.

"media"

Twitter is 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.

With section 230 protection because they are not an editorial news organization under the defined meaning

Media outlets: NY Times, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR.

Tech companies: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter.

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.

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!

> Tech companies:

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.

> Does GE or John Deere write software for their hardware? Absolutely. Are they colloquially considered "tech" companies? No.

Because tech is not their primary line of business.

> Twitter is a media company (they distribute media).

A media company is the thing that produces media, not the thing that distributes it. Cogent is not a media company.

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?

I'd go with:

1) No,

2) No,

3) They'd practically ignore it,

and 4) probably not even 1%

> 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.

I think you broke the analogy with the John Deere food thing.

> tech is not their primary line of business.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet

> 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.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet

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.

> Panasonic.

Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...

> Guess what...NBC merged with Comcast and Comcast is a telecomm company, which guess what...distributes media.

Alice is a lawyer and Bob is a doctor and a lawyer. Why would that imply that Alice is a doctor?

> Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...

And Twitter is a communications service.

They're not in the same line of business as the entities that employ reporters.

> Twitter is a communications service.

Ok so they're not a tech company. Glad we solved that. /handshake-emoji/

A communications service that operates using internet servers to run code they wrote... is a tech company.

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?

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.

> I mean, if you want to be totally pedantic about it, go for it.

I do, because the definition is so loose that it gets manipulated by investors / the overall market. Great example:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-cogan-8627b955_dtc-stockm...

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.

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?

China controls their state media, NPR/BBC etc. have state funding but remain editorially independent.

Yes, I know. Just pointing out that media isn't the only industry that's state funded to the person who's comment was just "media".

That seems like a contradiction.

This is why you can't stop at "who funded it" as an indicator of bias and editorial control, but have to look at what is actually produced as well.

Clair Cameron Patterson famously took money from the leaded gasoline industry to help fund his research demonstrating the harms of leaded gasoline.

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?

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.

> 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 :) .

> If a media outlet is being funded by the government then readers should know that because it could affect their coverage

close, if there is evidence their coverage is actually being affected, readers should know that because that is what should inform their decision

in some cases, where the funding constitutes a large portion of total funding, it may be appropriate to add a disclaimer

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

A social media company is a media company in the same way that a cyberspace company is a space company.

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.

Tell that to Starlink.

And social media companies are more like convenience stores that also carry newspapers. The large majority of tweets are not by media outlets.

There are just a ton of "letters to the editor", now.

> 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.

Wasn't spaceX partly funded by the CIA's investment capital arm?

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).

[0] https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-...

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 free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)

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.

> 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?

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.

Substack was temporarily suspended for stealing data to seed their Twitter clone. They stopped and you can once again like and retweet their posts

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.

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.

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...

Twitter doesn't exist anymore (as of yesterday[1]), so the Saudis' ownership shares likely transferred to X Corp.

How much of X is now owned by Saudi Arabia is the real question.

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-no-longe...

Large shareholders were moved to equity upon purchase.

In other words..the Saudi you are referencing was a large shareholder of the “Old Twitter”.

That’s along the lines of “how much did Russia fund Facebook”

VTB (sanctioned bank) funded Facebook in the tune of $1bn. It also funded Twitter in 2011 for $191m.

Buying shares is not funding. Unless the shares are emitted from the co itself. Which happens during IPO and dilution only.

> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding?

They aren't trying to hide it.

The NASA contracts are very much public.

Here is how NPR is funded:

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

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.

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"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media

"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]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Electoral_Knowledge_Networ...

"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. "

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.

Would you call any laboratory at a land grant university that receives research grants from the government a “state affiliated lab”?

Have you ever seen money being given without any strings attached?

Yes, for Public Broadcasting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA

> To say that NPR doesn’t receive a significant portion of its budget from the federal government is a lie.

Since you failed to keeps scrolling down, here's the link to the "local station revenues" section

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

5% from Federal and state and local governments.

Another 8% comes from CPB, which is a federally funded, private non-profit. The vast majority of CPB's funding goes towards public television, not public radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...

So yes, actually.

>To say that NPR doesn’t receive a significant portion of its budget from the federal government is a lie

Do you have any evidence of this? Less than 1% of NPR's funding comes from federal sources, according to wikipedia.

Reread the comment.

I just did. Can you elaborate on why they think Wikipedia is lying?

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.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...

From the Wiki link:

> 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?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...

From the article:

> It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

If this is true why NYT published the following:

“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.

Not sure what your point is here. This article isn’t saying NPR fears collapse.

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.

[1] https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151

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.

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

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.

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.

They don’t produce news so maybe no?

> 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.

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.

Okay, by the same label, I mean "state affiliated"

I think the "state affiliated media" could be applied to Twitter by the same standards, but for Tesla & SpaceX, just "state affiliated"

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.

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

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.

When Chinese and Russian state propaganda channels are getting the same label for a different situation, it’s a bit off.

Your (and Elons) argument has shades of the famous ‘with us or against us’ line. Details matter.

And Fox News had a direct line to the White House and was influenced heavily by it. Was it not just as biased?

That's in reverse. Trump was Fox sponsored. Fox wasn't Trump sponsored. Fox doesn't need a "Fox affiliated media" label.

Maybe it needs a "NewsCorp/Murdoch affiliated" label.

As biased as Fox News is, it would be completely ridiculous to call it state-affiliated media.

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.

> This is not some conspiracy theory. It was very much out in the open.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Tons. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/29/h... among others. He literally live tweeted about the something related to FOX News segment as it was happening.

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.

Twitter is a publisher. Just like newspapers publish AP stories, Twitter publishes the latest memes from users.

As someone not in US newspaper terms, I thought AP was associated publisher (ie another publisher who gives them rights to edit the story)

This seems super far from what twitter is. Please explicitly explain how an AP story is in regards to twitter.

SpaceX and Tesla are not newspapers/publishers.

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.

I'd be fairly happy for Twitter to declare their own potential conflicts of interest.

That doesn't mean Twitter shouldn't correctly label state funded media.

He just wants NPR defunded

metoo

Twitter 2.0 is all just an anti-tax bro doing anti-tax stuff for the GOP.

Twitter and its curation and targeting mechanisms make it very much a publisher.

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.

> knowingly promoting false information.

This in itself should be enough to remove media organisation protections.

NPR is not nor has it ever been state-affiliated media in any reasonable sense of the word. Is it a full stop, bald-face lie.

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.

Any entity created by an Act of Congress is by definition affiliated with the federal government.

Hudson's bay company is incorporated by English Royal charter in 1670. By definition it is a department store affiliated with the English king :)

With the Crown yes, not a particular individual.

In fact there are still some families in Canada with noble titles, hearldry, etc., who are indeed affiliated with the Crown.

Has NPR evolved since its inception? Sure. But "nor has it ever been" is... misleading at best:

> Funding for NPR comes from [...other sources...] and annual grants from the publicly-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hmm, let's look into said Corporation:

> On February 26, 1970, the CPB formed National Public Radio (NPR)

> The CPB's annual budget is composed almost entirely of an annual appropriation from Congress plus interest on those funds.

> The CPB is governed by a nine-member board of directors selected by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate

I mean... If this wasn't "state-affiliated media" at its inception, I'm not entirely sure what is.

Not sure if you realize that "State-affiliated" has a very different meaning than "received government funds"

Of course, but NPR's origins are from a government-controlled organization.

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.

NPR != RT

Musk is in way over his head.

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.

I agree and wasn't fond of the "state-affiliated" label but they switched to "government funded" which I agree with.

How is receiving funding from someone not a form of affiliation with them?

affiliated:

"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.

Based on what criteria? NPR is specifically in the congressional budget by law..yes, we have a law to keep them funded by the US govt.

Is the criteria money? coercion? backdoor-deals? bias?

As per Twitter’s criteria, it’s money.

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."

Control/Coercion seem more important, especially since Twitter has a separate category for media with government funding. (cf https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia... for both)

I was asking your criteria.

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.

Correction: Twitter lists NPR as government-funded media, not state affiliated media [0]

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/NPR

It was changed to that. Originally the label was as given in the headline: "state-affiliated media".

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

NPR is listed as government-funded media, not state-affiliated media [0]

A large part of their funding comes from congress -> corporation for public broadcasting -> local NPR affiliates -> NPR.

It is indirect funding, yes, but they are very much funded by the US government.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/NPR

It was changed to that. Originally the label was as given in the headline: "state-affiliated media".

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"

How is 1% a large part?

Quoting https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

> On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.

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.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...

The label was "State Affiliated media" not "publicly funded".

The label doesn't say anything about publishing or printing a newspaper, it says media. Social media is surely media?

"Sea Lion" comment/question. It's a distraction.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

> > Why does it matter that their funding is disclosed to the reader?

> It's a distraction.

Categorizing an argument doesn't provide justification for that categorization.

> 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.

Irrelevant and misleading. By Twitter’s own guidelines it’s not a state owned publisher.

> Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla are not newspapers/publishers.

Twitter is a publisher, though (because of Section 230) they are not liable as a publisher for most of what they publish under US law.

Funny

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 chooses what to push in front or not, it absolutely is a publisher

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.

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.

> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding?

Are SpaceX or Tesla news organizations?

They can post on Twitter in the same way as others can. If the objective is to show potential bias, why only apply it to some accounts?

Can't wait to see the same logic applied to twitter posters on welfare.

strawman.

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).

Do you also get your news from SpaceX and Tesla?

No, but why not label them as "state affiliated space company" and "state affiliated automobile manufacturer"

because their product is not information, so any personal/political bias they may have is not reflected in their products, which are apolitical.

I didn't realized Twitter was a media company and not a social network.

It's right there in the name, social media.

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.

That seems like moving goalposts.

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.

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”

I wonder if this will have any domino effect, right now the only thing holding Twitter together is its network effects. According to the article on NPR's site[0], they have 8.7 million followers and run 52 different accounts so Twitter is losing a pretty important partner.

Also, no mention of Mastodon in this announcement. It sounds like they're just going to use Facebook for the time being.

0: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...

Last week, the Federal Reserve issued an important update on twitter. So no, I don't think twitter is worried about losing NPR. Twitter has the strongest network effects of any contemporary social network.

Well, I'm sure they didn't issue it only on twitter, right? That'd just be part of their normal media processes. Post it on the website. Post it on twitter. Post it on Facebook. Send press releases to media outlets. Blah blah blah.

No dopamine hit with twitter anymore.

Network effect is literally the only thing holding non-federated social networks together

> no mention of Mastodon in this announcement

Mastodon blew its moment. It could have eaten Twitter’s lunch. But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

This will always be a problem with federated vs unfederated services. It's hard to get a network effect when things are so spread out without a central place.

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.

Email stands as a notable counter-example.

but that's not how you use email. you don't sign up for an email account, and then go searching for other users to follow and what not with in the same server.

with social platforms, you do just that. you want to see a centralized list of available users to choose to follow or subscribe or join cult or whatever.

i'm deliberately using centralized here as not needing to know that multiple servers exist with different users in each. maybe i'm showing my ignorance of mastodon, but it seems like mastodon.com or whatever central website could just publish a list that mastodon clients can refer to rather than making users discovery a hunt and fetch kind of process. like a torrent index site. if that already exists, then i'll TIL the workings of mastodon. if it doesn't exists, then it seems very short sited.

If people wanted email 2.0 they wouldn't have flocked to social media 1.0 and begun doing most of their correspondence through messaging instead of email.

> But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

I'm not entirely sure that's a bug. Specifically, I'm curious whether it squelches non-niche conversations like: Are vaccines a nefarious plot by Bill Gates to implant mind-control chips?

I don't think there's anything they can really do about that. It's a federated platform, the user is going to have to pick a server. Aside from some landing page that shows you servers based on your interests, I don't know what else they could do.

I do agree that migrating between servers could be a more streamlined process though.

Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain. They could even have had a signup form on their .org website that would return “Your account has been created! Yours is on [xyz].com! But don’t worry, it will connect to other accounts from all others of the federation.”

> Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain.

soo... mastodon.social? the instance listed as first option, clearly marked as being run by the Mastodon company?

Weird TLDs don’t inspire trust. I would have never guessed that mastodon.social were the most serious place to start a Mastodon account.

luckily you didn't need to guess, because it's presented as the first entry, including the information that it is run by the company, when you go look at the .org page for where to sign up, just as you wanted.

But I'm sure you'll find another reason why doing exactly what you suggested isn't reasonable.

Everyone likes to blame the server interface, but honestly that's not so bad and I think most people get over it.

Mastodon's real problem in my opinion is that its primary audience today doesn't actually want anyone new to join - it's VERY toxic for newcomers who don't fit a specific mold. It's a shame, cause we really do need something new.

I'm hoping some of the new decentralized ones take off.

Edit: I think the comment about this being survivor bias is fair, but I still believe the community itself is a bigger hurdle for Mastodon than the signup flow

> it's VERY toxic for newcomers who don't fit a specific mold.

I have not experienced that ... at all. Surely this is highly instance dependent.

Have you considered you fit the mold?

I have considered that I don't fit most molds, but I am very observant.

I could believe that it's possible to stumble upon an instance that fits who you are and offers a great onboarding experience - but it's far from the norm.

The reason I'm confident saying that is that it's actually by design for the platform. The community is very hostile towards any kind of discovery tools or enhancements that help you explore the network without a direct introduction. Any attempt to provide that functionality is blasted with an intense amount of aggression and shut down.

That can be fine if they don't want to be Twitter. But I don't take it seriously as a Twitter replacement.

Which instance is nice?

I understand the hesitancy in some respects. Longtime Mastodon users fear a mass migration of the toxic elements of Twitter into what has been their private sphere. If Mastodon becomes Twitter 2.0 then we have solved nothing.

It's a well-founded concern, too. Every new wave has a cacophony of people demanding it change to work exactly like Twitter so they don't have to learn anything new or change, dooming them to experience exactly what they left if they got their way.

It reminds me of how Metro Atlanta has grown. People move out a bit to get away from Atlanta traffic. Then they miss all the stuff they had in Atlanta, and start clamoring for all they miss from where they moved from. It often starts with a Target or a movie theater. Ten years on, they're complaining about Atlanta traffic again, and they move. And the cycle repeats until half of North Georgia is consumed by a web of crumbling asphalt roads dangling off packed highways.

The difference here is Mastodon, as a community, said "No. Learn a new way or buzz off." Most people buzz off, and occasionally complain about how hostile the community was to them to anyone who'll listen. Some people stick around and appreciate the different way of doing things. Repeat.

I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter.

The challenge is that it's intentionally difficult to find your community on there unless you're invited in from an existing connection outside of Mastodon. I understand that's how some people want it - but blaming users for not understanding how to "learn a new way" in the first place IS hostile - whether you want to hear it or not.

Ultimately, doesn't matter. Mastodon will be what it will be, and folks like me will find something else that's a little more welcoming to people who aren't quite as my-tribe-only focused.

>> "I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter."

Then you're not who I'm referring to.

This is survivor bias. If you're a non-tech person signing up for a new service, the federation aspect is just wizard talk and it's not obvious what difference it makes. Most people do not want to go on side quests to find other people they know or figure out which digital village they live in, especially not as the first stage in the onboarding process.

Fair point, then I guess I'd adjust my comment to say "in ADDITION to the server issue....".

The reality is even once you're connected, it can be a rough place to explore for newcomers.

People manage to deal with this when they sign up for their email account. It's just that we don't (yet) have the equivalent of gmail (or hotmail, aol before that) as a default option.

Twitter has always been a cesspool. You're fighting not only other people but also the algorithm / popularity contest. I actually hate it and never want to go back, but for some it's engaging. People probably don't use Mastodon just cause nobody they care about is on it and the whole multi-instance thing is weird.

That hasn't been my experience. I joined a couple months ago and I have yet to see a single instance of toxicity in my feeds or replies. But I am guessing it greatly depends on the type of groups and content you interact with.

The great thing about Mastodon is that it doesn't push anything in my face that I didn't subscribe to.

I looked at joining Mastodon.

The first "recommended" server on the Mastodon's official website was something about anime, and the second seemed to be about some "Queer friendly furry community", whatever that means. Then there was one about tech and and the local Bay Area one.

At least, unlike GNU Ring (or whatever it's called nowadays) it didn't just crash on startup.

I'm pretty technical, but neither of those were the reasons I quickly abandoned Mastodon.

I don't care about federation, and I want algorithmic discovery. Specific I want to follow all sorts of people from around the world (on multiple mastodon servers) and have more people suggested to me based on that. Mastodon can't even reliably search across servers.

Most people do not get over it.

My experience was bad. A lot of servers my friends used didn't take new sign ups so I was forced to pick my own which went offline a few weeks later and I haven't tried using it since because there's no indicator of server quality that I know of and all the servers with a lot of active users are not taking signups. Recommendations from HN would be appreciated.

I use social.coop, and it seems to work well. They have some kind of participatory administration too that I don't know very well.

My recommendation is to find an instance with some kind of governance plan, and hopefully a stable stream of donations. Volunteer instances indeed could go at any time. And of course, if you can, donate to one or a few instances out of good citizenship.

I think it's also worth mentioning there are other services built around ActivityPub as well (and federation). I found friendica pretty good (as a Mastodon/facebook alternative), although I don't use it.

Instances I can recommend to HN fellows are probably https://floss.social/about, https://chaos.social/explore and https://mathstodon.xyz/about. But don't worry too much, you can move later without too much issue (though moving posts themselves is not possible).

I don't think they "blew it" but it could have been better. I think it would be better if they have a blurb about how it is very much like email; you pick a provider and sign up then after that you can message anyone else via your "address" and provider. Also, they could be a LOT more clear about which instances are accepting new signups.

Also a "decentralized" social media network is something an engineer thinks is great, but no user does.

The internet blew its moment. But onboarding—specifically, choosing an ISP—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

lol you wish

You joke, but Mastodon could’ve learned from the history there, at least in the US. AOL in particular had a huge mainstream user base that didn’t really understand what was AOL and what was Internet. Witgout that gentle introduction, yes, many would’ve have been stuck trying to figure out which company to use to get online for longer.

AOL also charged you $15 a month for an email subdomain, whereas on Mastodon that kind of lock-in wouldn't exist. Creating an AOL-like company for Mastodon doesn't work unless your ultimate goal is to be blocked by every major federated community.

Sure. AOL was also a commercial service and joining Mastodon.social is free. A facade over the Internet would look different than a facade over a federated social network in many ways.

This is by design, Mastodon goal was never to replace Twitter, it's an alternative but with different goals. Mastodon isn't a centralized platform. This is good. The people that after a broad global audience shouldn't expect Mastodon to replace Twitter. Mastodon is its own thing.

I am viewing Twitter more than before because I am attracted to the open speech where political banning is no longer occurring. I do not know all who have been blocked under Musk but it feels more open.

Fox News probably had more followers when they stopped posting on Twitter a few years ago. Not to mention all the right wing momentum behind Parler, Gab, Telegram, Truth Social etc. didn't make a noticeable dent.

For a company that "stopped posting on Twitter" they sure post a lot: https://twitter.com/FoxNews

If you're going to be wrong at least don't be snarky.

https://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-breaks-16-month-twitter-sil...

I think the Dominoes have been falling for a while. I mostly quit the bird in November. I pop over once or twice a week these days to see what's happening and the degradation of content is very apparent. It may be because of departures or it may be because his constant weaponizing, sorry monetizing, of the algorithm but it's a lot quieter. A lot of the people I liked to follow from our industry are gone. It's a stark contrast to what the app was even a year ago. All while their CEO rebrands them as Titter and has people repaint signs.

The most recent gaff of exposing people "private" circles to the main feed (including private nudes) is probably going to create a new slew of legal issues.

> Also, no mention of Mastodon in this announcement. It sounds like they're just going to use Facebook for the time being.

I think it is time that we can call it a day after 7 years, and we should also admit that the Mastodon experiment has become unviable, unscalable, obsolete and already extinct as a serious alternative against Twitter. It had its slither of a chance, and it still failed.

Maybe a lesson in networks effects will tell you why the 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still continue to use the platform. Unsurprisingly.

mastodon as an open source project is wildly successful what are you even talking about?

Had you read my comment, you would know that my point still stands unrefuted.

I would assume a single account with 8.7 million followers isn't a big deal to Twitter. It's not like the 8.7 million NPR followers are unique to NPR and are going to disappear. Those 8.7 million followers probably follow 8.7 million other things themselves.

I'd be willing to guess a single Kardashian has more followers than NPR (maybe I'm too cynical). Eventually, the way Musk is running Twitter, he'll give a free blue check mark for the Brawndo Corp. Maybe he could just rename Twitter to "Ow, my balls"

That’s true to some extent but NPR and its people provide a ton of timely content which keeps users active. People like the “what’s going on” aspect and news organizations disproportionately help provide that.

Worst case, Twitter can set up something like "system accounts" that automatically fetch headlines from news websites or RSS feeds and post them with links on Twitter.

Twitter has recently been playing cat and mouse with its API access -- why wouldn't these news sites just block twitter's RSS agents?

How do you even block one organization from accessing your RSS feeds or your homepage HTML while allowing others to access it? How do you tell apart my requests and Twitter's requests if they both come from a residential IP or a common VPN?

These are companies, they work with the law: put terms of use on your content which ban cloaking your identity. When the unique identifier you put in your feeds shows up on the unauthorized profile, you now have evidence not only that they were illegally using your content but also they knew that and were trying to defeat an access control mechanism.

At that point, all of the big content companies are on your side – none of them are going for a “but we really want to use their content without paying for it!” argument – and it further increases the number of people reconsidering their continued use of the site.

If I was a newsie that had an account on a platform that tried to negatively impact the reach of my account on that platform, you better believe I would go out of my way to restrict access to any of my feeds/api/whatevs to said platform. If my account is not okay by their standards for my account to exist unencumbered, why would it be okay by their standards to aggregate via a feed just to get some retention of their users. Capital F that noise

8.7 million followers but take a look at their feed. Go back a week in time (for a snapshot) and the like/retweets/comments are generally in the 10s or low hundreds, with a few exceptions (low thousands). Same with NYT. Last time I looked they had 50+ million followers with similar low engagement.

So how many of their followers are bots and what’s NPRs true value to Twitter? I don’t know. I’ve got a small 5k following and I have similar engagement.

You hit the nail on the head.

Most twitter account followers are nothing but bots. Millions of 'followers' but likes and retweets only in the dozens.

It also makes for huge egos. Like, they know they bought all their followers, but they wake up one day and forget, and start to believe their own bullshit.

To be fair it is everywhere, youtube accounts will millions of followers do the same. Never more than 200 comments or likes on them.

Seems to me the only organic accounts are the ones with only a few K.

I assume anything with 100k-1 million followers is 95% bots.

No one ever thought it was odd that these accounts all got their million followers in the first few days of acct creation, then literally didnt gain any more ever?

Or how odd it is that every celebrity or business just happened to hit 1mil+?

Low engagement does not absolutely equate paid bots. Twitter is ooold. I bet the overwhelming majority of NPR followers are inactive accounts by people who signed up somewhere in the '10s and went to the website twice.

Not when all their followers were gained the first week.

Please show me the celebrity/business/politician with even a quarter as many retweets or likes as their follower count.

It doesn't happen. It's an open secret they all buy their followers. They call it 'growth hacking' or 'fake it till you make it'- I call it bullshit.

There are firms that do nothing but increase follower count.

Simply do an internet search for 'where to buy twitter followers'. It's pretty sad its literally that simple.

I got 0 engagement with hundreds of real followers by the end, but the situation got worse every year with a tangible nosedive in the new era. This was a carefully curated following where I blocked and reported every bot that showed up. The problem is Twitter.

And too bad, also, since the On The Media hosts seem to have joined a journalist-centric server that would have been the perfect place for them: https://journa.host/about

I wouldn't envy the hosts having to read our their addresses but npr.org could absolutely implement WebFinger if they were thus inclined

Wonder what all those social media interns are going to do all day long when they shut down those 52 accounts.

>8.7 million followers and run 52 different accounts so Twitter is losing a pretty important partner

Nah.

> It receives less than 1 percent

Why do they keep saying they receive almost nothing, yet at the same time say government funding is essential to their operation?

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

> Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that make up an important part of a diverse revenue mix that includes listener support, corporate sponsorship and grants. Stations, in turn, draw on this mix of public and privately sourced revenue to pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming.

Sounds like it may be more than 1% in total?

NPR is one of several providers to individual public radio stations. The government supports those individual stations; they use some of that support to purchase programs from NPR, American Public Media, PRX, etc.

The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.

This came more or less directly from our NPR station in DC as they talked about fund raising in their many, many drives. And this wasn't for the station itself, I believe this was for NPR, since they then went on to talk about how many stations, mostly in rural areas, had a funding inverse of that.

Basically, if you are listening to NPR outside a major population center, then its almost certainly because Federal dollars make that possible. And if you listen and contribute to a major station, then you are one of the few that pay the 90% or so of the budget for the content on NPR.

> The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.

If that's accurate, then I'd love for NPR to explain the order of magnitude gap between their claim of 1% and that 10% figure. That's a huge difference.

to upon_drumhead: Federal funding laundered through sub-orgs that share the same "NPR" branding is still federal funding.

Member station funding is different then the actual NPR organization funding.

Member stations paying NPR is the bulk of NPRs funding.

From the article:

>Most of NPR's funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

Also, here's NPR's report on financing: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance.... It also includes breakdowns of member station financing. 8% average from CPB, 5% from other government sources.

You’re conflating the local NPR affiliate with the news company and radio content aggregator. It like you’re saying that my local NBC station is owned by NBC News, when it’s locally owned (well, in my case owned by a company with a lot of stations, but not NBC itself).

Less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes directly from the government itself through competitive grants, etc.

Some of the budget comes from member stations (presumably more than 1%) who themselves receive some level of state or federal funding. Those are the entities that receive ~10% of their budgets from a government of one kind or another (the rest coming from donations or other non-profit funding). But those stations can get content from a variety of other public radio sources. I believe NPR can (did?) handle some of the distribution of non-NPR content via their satellite services.

Originally NPR was directly funded by the CPB to a much greater extent. However that changed substantially in the 80s when the stations themselves started receiving funding from the CPB instead of NPR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

If you look at the breakdown lower in the page, 31% of NPR's revenue comes from member station licensing fees and of the member station funding 13% comes from government sources, so in total that would be 4%.

They also say my $60/yr is essential so I can’t see NPR saying $3 million as non-essential.

Because the bulk of NPRs funding comes from the dues of member stations most of which are non-profits and receive funding from a myriad of sources.

Hard to say what percent of their funding comes from some governmental source but it’s all indirect and arms length.

A lot of folks confuse NPR With PBS which is publicly funded and many of NPR’s member stations are PBS affiliated.

> Because the bulk of NPRs funding comes from the dues of member stations most of which are non-profits and receive funding from a myriad of sources.

From wikipedia:

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.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

31% of their funding comes from member stations. 13% of member station funding comes from government sources. In total that would make about 31% * 13% = 4%.

> 13% of member station funding comes from government sources

What is the source of this number? Also is 4% as opposed to 1% a change that alters any of the underlying fundamentals ?

The source is the document in the hyperlink at the start of the comment.

Got it, you added up 8 and 5. Question remains:

> Also is 4% as opposed to 1% a change that alters any of the underlying fundamentals ?

It doesn't really change anything, either way NPR have stated that federal funding is essential to their operation.

Doesn't seem outlandish to call them government funded if the government is funding essential operations. Some of the same people who go on ad nauseam about how Tesla and SpaceX have received government funding are curiously resistant to the idea though.

> It doesn't really change anything, either way NPR have stated that federal funding is essential to their operation.

Every organization on earth refers to every penny of its budget as "essential" as to not lose any of it. Obviously they could still exist and find a way to replace 1% of their total budget if necessary.

> Every organization on earth refers to every penny of its budget as "essential" as to not lose any of it.

Untrue.

> Obviously they could still exist and find a way to replace 1% of their total budget if necessary.

They chose to represent themselves as having their essential operations funded by the government. Even if that was a lie, perceptions are very important when it comes to conflicts of interest, transparency, public funding, politics, and independence. The entire basis of their protest to Twitter is about the perception created by the "government funded" label. So lying to the public about something like that for an allegedly insignificant amount of money would be a singularly idiotic thing for NPR to do.

> Untrue

Right, organizations routinely admit they are getting too much funding and ask for it to be reduced. There are so many examples of this, perhaps you could provide just one?

> They chose to represent themselves as having their essential operations funded by the government

Again, so they don't lose that funding. I don't think any of them could have predicted a right wing billionaire would buy Twitter and give them a misleading label because he doesn't understand the difference between state and public media.

> Right, organizations routinely admit they are getting too much funding and ask for it to be reduced. There are so many examples of this, perhaps you could provide just one?

I have been in several situations where I have been asked to prioritize and categorize essential and non-essential funding. Not for public / public funded / government jobs, so it's not necessarily made public. But it obviously happens.

If they don't want to outright admit it so openly is one thing, but lying about their operations and public funding is quite another.

> Again, so they don't lose that funding.

That didn't address the content of my reply. You're just repeating the same thing again lol, so same reply applies.

> I don't think any of them could have predicted a right wing billionaire would buy Twitter and give them a misleading label because he doesn't understand the difference between state and public media.

The label that might mislead people into believing the government provides essential funding for their operation?

>I have been in several situations where I have been asked to prioritize and categorize essential and non-essential funding. Not for public / public funded / government jobs, so it's not necessarily made public. But it obviously happens.

What you were asked to do sounds more like an audit, which isn't what i'm talking about. Government organizations (or non-profits, NGOs, etc.) don't announce to the world they don't need as much money as they are getting. Or if they do, i'm still waiting on an example.

> but lying about their operations and public funding is quite another

Don't know how you got there, clearly not what i'm saying.

> The label that might mislead people into believing the government provides essential funding for their operation?

I have a question. The House GOP tweeted out "Defund @NRP" - Elon tweeted the same thing a hour later, highlighting the "essential funding". How does that work? How does the entire right wing internet get behind the same talking points all at once?

Losing 1% (or 4% depending how you look at funding) will not make any organization go away, use basic logic. They are clearly saying that as to not disrupt future funding.

> What you were asked to do sounds more like an audit, which isn't what i'm talking about. Government organizations (or non-profits, NGOs, etc.) don't announce to the world they don't need as much money as they are getting. Or if they do, i'm still waiting on an example.

So, goalpost moving?

> Don't know how you got there, clearly not what i'm saying.

Sounds like you are. Either they're lying or the government funds essential operations.

> I have a question.

How about you address what I wrote first before you keep deflecting. I don't give a rats ass about "the house GOP" and they have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

> A lot of folks confuse NPR With PBS which is publicly funded

PBS gets a minority of its funding from government, and a minority of what it gets from government from the Federal government.

But it gets a bigger minority of its funding from government than NPR does.

They usually emphasize listener funding in virtually all broadcasts I have ever seen.

Because every penny counts. What business would turn around and say : "We don't need that 1%, you can have it back".

It's state affiliated. Like Tesla. Like any company who received covid relief. Tax breaks etc.

Less than 1 percentage is simply not influential. It's disingenuous to say it's owned by the government.

It depends on the perception one has of the US govt. If one considers them benign and aligns with their policy, 1% seems is not a big deal. If one doesn't, even 1% funding is considered influence. Imagine one politician you don't like receiving 1% from the Russian or North Korean government, or say from the Meta corp, I wouldn't have a problem calling out them as being "funded" or even "influenced".

> What business would turn around and say : "We don't need that 1%, you can have it back".

The one which would try to claim independence and non-influence from said entity?

> It's state affiliated. Like Tesla. Like any company who received covid relief. Tax breaks etc.

So... everyone and everything is state affiliated and should be labeled as such?

That's obviously not the case. State affiliated should be limited to organizations that are influenced/controlled significantly by the state, which NPR is not. This is actually the definition that Twitter advertises.

I believe the "state affiliated media" tagline is as you might guess, intended for media who's editorial opinions should be taken with their state affiliation in context. What utility does it serve to label SpaceX, Tesla, Lockheed, Boeing, or any other company that does not publish editorial opinions as "state affiliated". I don't get what people don't understand here.

NPR and PBS would not exist right now or in the future if their government funding grants were revoked. That puts a nonexistent bias on their editorial decisions. I seem to remember NPR "leaking"/breaking the story on WMDs in Iraq with one of their journalists directly quoting internal contacts in the Pentagon as their source. They are clearly far from immune to being used as agents of propaganda. That being said, I personally hold both NPR & PBS Newshour in very high regard. I do think that placing them in them in the same categorisation as RT or even the BBC is reductionist. Perhaps there should be varying levels of "state affiliated media" labeling.

This isn't just about NPR itself. They depend on local broadcast networks to reach their audience. How much does government grants influence the local stations? I know in my state, the majority of local public radio funding comes from the government.

Either the money is important to NPR, or it is not. If and only if is important, it gives the government leverage over the organization.

Infrastructure like roads are important to NPR, or they are not.

NPR (and every other company) that relies on US roadways is giving the US govt levarage over the organization no?

if "every penny counts", and the federal government gives them a single penny, then by definition they owe their continued existence to the federal government.

there is a difference between a company that makes electric automobiles, and a company that influences the thoughts and (crucially) feelings of the populace through opinion and reporting.

we all agree that all of these things are true for government-dependent media organizations outside of the West, but for some reason many refuse to believe that the same thing happens here domestically.

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.

Where do you address the fact that npr says that “stable” funding represents only 1% of total funding?

What's there to address? 1% stable funding is still 1% you can rely on, just because you receive additional funds from private sectors or alternative sources that are unreliable, doesn't negate this. You can literally see this in CPB funding, where private sources are incredibly variable, and that is what CPB gets, NPR is only allotted a portion.

It's disingenuous to talk as if the relationship to NPR content to their funding is some simple linear relationship.

Every penny of their income is important. If they had less content to provide to member stations, those stations would have less content and would pull in fewer donations. It then becomes a death spiral since less content results in fewer donations.

While federally originated dollars are a small portion of NPR's total income they're not unimportant since they can't be replaced by other sources. A 1% reduction in income means they need to reduce expenses by 1%.

In your analogy, $1k/month goes into savings. Losing that wouldn't break you financially. You're not spending your all of your income. If you were you'd need to cut your expenses by the $1k/month. In that case you'd consider that 1% pretty important.

Disconnect between direct federal funding and aggregate funding from a variety of public institutions or grants from publicly funded NGOs at national/state/local levels I imagine.

In 2022, CPB got $465M from the Federal government. Of that, $72M goes to "Direct grants to local public radio stations", $24M to "Radio National Program Production and Acquisition grants" and $7.3M to "Radio Program Fund".

https://cpb.org/aboutcpb/financials/budget

According to NPR's 2020 budget, total revenue was $275M, of which $92.7M was "Station dues, programming and digital fees".

https://media.npr.org/documents/about/statements/fy2020/Nati...

So ~ 1/3 of NPR's revenue is from member stations, and some percentage of that revenue is part of the $72M that the stations were granted from CPB.

Looking at WBUR's budget as a randomly picked example, its 2022 revenue was $39.7M of which $1.8M was grants. Let's call that 4.5%.

https://media.wbur.org/wp/2023/01/WBUR-Special-Purpose-Finan...

Let me pick another random station, WUNC. In 2018 its total revenue was $13.8M. of that CPB grants were $617.8K. Again, about 4.5%.

http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wunc/files/wunc_2018_...

Using 4.5% as the percentage of of the $72M from CPB that ends up as part of the 1/3rd of NPRs revenue. 4.5% x 33% = ~1.5%.

I gather then that even though it's a small part of NPR's revenue, it's very high leverage in helping to keep all of the member stations afloat. I guess that's how they can simultaneously downplay the dollar amount while also speaking of how critical it is.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

I may have gotten my math wrong here somewhere, corrections appreciated.

I ignored the $24M and $7.3M of the CPB budget because I wasn't sure what to do with them, but you can read more about those here:

https://www.cpb.org/funding/

It's probably fair count some part of those dollars as part of NPR's funding, I just don't know how much.

I think it has more to do with preserving the fiction that they're significantly more independent from commercial interests than other news media. Losing dedicated public funding would make them a commercial network that also begs for donations a few times a year, probably harming donation and removing some of the halo-effect that advertisers are looking for by "sponsoring" them (paying for ads).

In short, it'd push them farther out of the ad niche they've carved for themselves, which could have serious revenue consequences beyond that 1%.

Grocery stores traditionally or supposedly only make 1% to 3% profit. These days it's probably 1%. So I'd say 1% is a lot if it's the thing keeping the company from going under if that income disappears.

Yes, but food is incredibly popular and buying it the most popular way to get it, so they're making a small margin on good volume.

Let’s graph all their sponsors and their connection to the corporations that also puppet our elected officials. My guess is the vast majority of their funding looks like:

Megacorp -> NPR Megacorp -> Exec -> NPR Megacorp -> Political NGO -> NPR

In addition to the direct Federal grant which is under the control of the same politicians in turn owned by these corporations.

The idea that it’s some independent real news organization is a farce.

Not to mention it is conveniently a non-profit so all those donations are tax write-offs. What better way to influence the voice of a media company?

NPR's funding does not come solely from direct appropriation. NPR receives a higher amount of federal funding than what is commonly believed. It is difficult to determine the exact amount of federal funding because it is hidden within the fees paid by local affiliates. These local affiliates receive a significant portion of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is itself funded by federal tax dollars.

Congressional appropriation > Corporation for Public Broadcasting > grants for local affiliates > fee paid to NPR

NPR is very up front about its funding: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

I'm sure NPR does some good work, and while I believe it is biased, I've found it to be less biased than CNN or MSNBC. I don't understand why NPR objects to being labeled as either state funded or state affiliated. It was established by an act of Congress, for one thing, and according to its own website, and its own disclosures, it does depend on federal funding. And that figure is substantially more than the claimed 1%. The 1% funding figure is misleading because it implies that the only kind of state funding is that coming directly from the federal government. The figure is much higher when you consider indirect state funding, the fact of NPR taking in dues from affiliates that are substantially dependent on federal grants or state and local grants or money that comes from public schools and public universities, all of which are funded by or subsidized by government.

In addition to the 1% figure being a lie, the writer of this piece failed to disclose that he is literally an employee of NPR. I guess it wasn't difficult to find out, but still...

WBUR is an NPR station, not only is it not difficult to find out the writer is an employee of NPR, it's out in the open and advertised as such. Do writers need to disclose on every article that they're employees of the organization they're writing for?

https://www.wbur.org/about

I think they should make it clear in the first paragraph when they are, in effect, writing about themselves or their employer. That's what I would have done.

It does disclose it... this is at the end of the article:

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. NPR's Bobby Allyn and Mary Yang contributed to this story. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

What more do you want?

You're right. I either missed it or the disclaimer was added after I first read the piece.

I think I'd have preferred it be up front in the first paragraph, and that the writer used language making it clear he was talking about his own company and not NPR as an entity he was able to be objective about. That's what I'd have done.

I'm not sure what you meant about the language to use -- but I do agree that I'd prefer to see disclosures upfront. I know that most NPR podcasts, for example, state the disclosure at the start of the podcast. Because honestly, I probably only finish about half of the articles I start -- I know, that's my fault.

I mean by language some difference in words or voice. For example, instead of describing what NPR's chief executive did, the author could have written about what his boss did.

maybe it was added in the 12 minutes since you wrote your comment but there is a disclaimer at the end stating the writer is an NPR correspondent.

The "state affiliated" label on Twitter was originally applied to sources that are not editorially independent from their states. Twitter put this label on NPR, then removed an explicit mention of NPR as non-state-affiliated from their public policy related to the label, then removed the mention of editorial independence from the policy entirely, then changed the label to "state funded."

I think it's easy to see why NPR objected to the initial "affiliated" labeling, and that they see the new one as just a quick wording change to try to bat back some criticism, but that it carries the same stigma.

In terms of the affiliation of the author, this is a story written by NPR itself: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...

The poster here on HN just happened to post the version from WBUR's website. Also, I don't know if it was edited later or not, but the piece both on NPR's site and WBUR's site has a disclosure at the end explicitly stating that it's NPR reporting on itself.

I'm not sure I care. To me, state funded is the same as state affiliated. The important thing is not that npr is labelled one way or the other. Everyone knows what NPR is and what the BBC is. Most fair people figure they have a bias but that sometimes they still do good work. The important thing is that by being consistent, and by labelling journalists and media brands like RT and the Chinese state media organs using the same rules we apply to npr and the BBC, we help information consumers understand when they're likely being propagandized.

This. It's not fair to apply this rule that kinda says "state affiliated/funded = propaganda" to everyone except for USA media, that's some USA exceptionalism.

Seems like a funny reaction to a label added as a subtitle to an organization with the name National Public Radio

People get attached to words or phrases without thinking about what they actually mean, seems like definitions get modified to emotionally herd the [un]imaginative/initiated

Wild that style of thinking goes that high up the chain at NPR the CEO sounds child-like with their response

The BBC just had their label corrected..

If it's such s small infraction then it should be easy for Musk to say they were wrong and correct it, right?

Because words and definitions matter, and you’re doing a lot of projection here

Twitter defines state-affiliated media 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. [1]

This isn't an accurate description of NPR. The government has no control over the content.

> NPR receives less than 1% of its direct funding from the federal government [2]

Even Twitter recognized this and walked back the labeling. [3]

[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR [3]: https://nypost.com/2023/04/10/twitter-rebrands-nprs-account-...

I can't stand NPR. It's always one sided and always the typical US propaganda. CSPAN is where it's at for raw politics.

The manuscripts make for excellent bedtime reading

Interesting I was unaware of the lack of direct connections in current days

My view was more from a historical context in which NPR as its now onown was a byproduct of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

Thanks for the insight

That's an odd reaction.

Twitter is in a precarious state with both advertisers and media folks like reporters. Advertisers are concerned that Elon Musk has a tendency to hurt brands by taking unpredictable, rash action. Reporters are concerned that Twitter is becoming increasingly political.

In a fit of conservative pique, Elon Musk took an umprompted pot shot at NPR by labeling it as "state-sponsored media," which fed heavily into both stories in a completely predictable way. Then he changed his screen name to "Harry Ballz."

And you accused the OTHER guy as "child-like."

I guess it depends on who you think the platform is designed for, I believe it is designed first and foremost for the users' and their experience which is not to say advertisers and media don't have a place but they should not be driving the direction of what is ultimately a design decision

Being surprised Elon is meming is is like being surprised [normal thing happens] while the CEO of NPR saying "At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again." Has one semi-controversial decision against his org. and decides to pull everyone in that org. off it, especially a firm whose management is known for rapid iteration, as shown earlier today with f.ex. the BBC label being updated

However I do understand American's propensity for being sensitive to having any of their institutions having the same labels as the bad guys'

The label carries a lot of weight that drags down NPRs integrity. Musk knows that, NPR knows that - NPR is doing the right thing rejecting the label.

It's a direct attack on the reputation and credibility of the organization from a man-child. Musk is targeting certain orgs and people because "hurr durr lolz I'm funny!" He's a troll.

I'm so glad that NPR is leaving Twitter. Many more will come. The world will be a better place when that cesspool is no longer bubbling.

The current CEO of NPR was the former global propaganda chief for the US government. This is a fact.

If you think that is a coincidence, and NPR is totally not de facto state-media, I have a bridge to sell you.

Props to Twitter's new leadership for doing what is ostensibly right, though who knows what their motivation is.

Had to look that up.

Current NPR CEO John Lansing used to be the CEO for USAGM which supervises Voice of America (VOA), Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe, etc.

https://www.usagm.gov/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media

Same label as Chinese and Russian state media? This was not was an apolitical decision based on facts.

It's so wild witnessing the degradation of Twitter.

Ragequitting is also degrading to NPR.

Why engage on the platform when it’s rigged by a narcissist? Like the Greyrock method, disengage.

Twitter only has value so long as it has network effect. People leaving diminish it. So why not?

Having standards and self respect isn't rage quitting.

How, specifically, does it degrade anybody to stop using Twitter?

Not at all ragequitting and not degrading to NPR. Staying on the platform tacitly implies NPR accepts the label ...which would be degrading, from their perspective.

If NPR doesn’t wish to accept the label it should refuse government funding.

So any company accepting grants is a state-affiliated company?

Honestly I kinda like it. I would extend it to any company accepting tax breaks.

Imagine the headline 'The church of the Last days, a state-affiliated non-profit, is warning that the end is near'.

McDonalds, a state funded eatery,... (because they accept tax breaks)

Amazon, a state funded company,... (because they shopped around for the best tax breaks)

Or any single other company that does what a company does by making any deal they can to better their bottom lines by taking tax breaks or gov't funding in any form would need to be called state funded.

It sort of loses its stigma from that view point.

The "known to the state of California to cause cancer" of funding-labeling.

i was thinking the cookie consent banner numbing, but yeah, i've always joked that i'm glad to live in a much less carcinogenic state than california.

Any media company accepting grants from the state is indeed state affiliated, yes.

If Twitter wants to survive it should stop antagonizing large users to make political statements

The policy isn’t political, it applies to all government funded media accounts.

BBC just had their state-affiliated label removed.

https://twitter.com/BBC

It’s been replaced with “publicly funded” which I think will also apply to NPR.

Which makes you wonder why it was never applied.

I think people should be slower to act.

Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.

If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.

Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.

"people" here refers to elmu,

and the acting refers to his label changes,

right?

Both. Elon's approach to all this is pointlessly erratic, alienating himself from numerous people and orgs he could really use as allies. He might be right that moving entirely to paid verification is needed... but even if that is needed, it could be rolled out over a long time, with much less alienation of the user base.

NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.

asking NPR to be patient while elmu abuses and insults them is like asking an abused spouse to just stick around in case their abuser with a history of abuse & gaslighting suddenly and inexplicably cleans up their act

at the very least, twitter & elmu have to understand their actions were wrong and show conciliation for wronging them – if they're incapable of that bare minimum, there's obviously no hope of them cleaning up their act

Or maybe they realize there's no benefit of being on Twitter anymore and they're not willing to take disrespect from a trollish man-child?

It's a pit of right-wing extremism and some of the most fawning sycophancy I've ever seen.

Experiences seem to vary a lot. Some people report the Twitter feed changed radically for the worse. Others (including me) have found it's about the same. I think it must depend greatly on what accounts you follow.

I think it speaks well of NPR.

Right?

> Twitter's communications shop now simply responds to reporters' emails with poop emojis.

Like, does Musk realize the market of trolls, clowns, and morons who enjoy his adolescent antics is... not worth $44 B?

He certainly figured it out, which is why he worked so hard to back out of the deal.

Though he never really expected it to earn its price back. As a large-fraction-of-a-trillion-aire, he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment. He was buying a chance to put a significant thumb on the finger of world culture.

Musk has so much money that he doesn't really care if there's a net positive return to his purchases. He spends money to enjoy it. Which I actually find bizarrely refreshing, compared to the ones who want to use it for the purpose of acquiring more money, plus the occasional conspicuous consumption that seems more like a performance than actual enjoyment (e.g. megayachts).

Too bad he's such an asshole, though.

> he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment

This is the most disappointing part. I have a hard time imagining that any of these billionaires are "good people" in a way that I would recognize. But before this Twitter thing I felt like at least I can respect the things Musk chooses to spend his time and money on. How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream? Seems like a waste to me.

> How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream

It would make 0 difference, SpaceX is already moving as fast as possible, throwing money at them would not make things go faster. In the future when actual ships start flying to Mars Elon will still have plenty to fund that personally if he needed to.

In other news, the first flight test of the largest rocket ever built is scheduled for Monday the 17th

Forget about Mars, what about spending that $44B to lobby the government to end poverty for children in the US, feels like a noble cause. Senators and Congressmen/women are bribed, excuse me, lobbied, for peanuts (< millions).

For $44B, he could have just given every child $2,000. Not enough to end poverty, but surely enough to keep them fed for a year.

I realize that this isn't practical; the causes of poverty are complex and just giving people money won't solve all of it. But it does give some notion of the scope of what could have been accomplished directly.

It's not worth it to you, of course.

But if you already have $100 billion dollars; and all you wanted in the world was adoration and accolades from adoring masses; and you didn't care those masses are trolls, clowns, and morons; then maybe $44 billion is the right price.

People keep saying this but I haven't noticed at all, I stopped using it for years but now I am back and have noticed only improvements

Sometimes it wont show me current tweets. My timeline is full of accounts that I don't follow and nobody I follow replied. I had to block musk's account because it was the only thing I was seeing. Tweets disappear when I try to look at them. Its been frustrating to say the least.

yeah, I noticed they divided your timeline to 'for me' and 'following' you just have to click 'following' and then its back.

There is a following accounts tab, and you can make lists to improve your your timeline.

It's waaaaay better for those of us without an account. It loads every time, rather than failing about 2/3 of the time (at least on mobile—always figured that was some weird dark pattern to try to get me to use the app, did it to me consistently for years across multiple devices), and doesn't block me with a loginwall if I scroll too far before hitting "more replies" anymore.

All the drama around Twitter's also flat-out hilarious if one doesn't care whether Twitter lives or dies, and lots of that drama's on Twitter, so I'd call that an improvement, too.

same

I take it for what it is, a notification engine for "influencers" and media, and a time-waster, and basically nothing else

it's essentially not good for anything else, if you put too much faith in it to do things like learning or discovering new things, you're going to be disappointed

but at what it does I think it's better than a couple of years ago when I last spent some time using it - it was unmitigated garbage at everything back then

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.

This seems perfectly fair to me and I don't understand the controversy. Maybe in the US people see "State Affiliated" as some kind of an insult? Public broadcasters like the BBC and Al Jazeera have done extraordinary work at times.

That being said it would only be fair to also include a badge for private media corporations that says who their parent corporation is.

Typically the State Affiliated badge is only applied to accounts where editorial control is in the hands of the state - think Chinese and Russian media companies.

Also interesting- after the change, NPR's badge says "Government-funded media" while the BBC's badge says "Publicly funded media," at least in the US. Al Jazeera does not have any such badge, other than the gold "Official Organization" badge.

US Politics revolves around being the underdog. If you're state affiliated you can't pitch yourself as the plucky underdog trying to change the world.

Thats why NPR would rather leave twitter than live with the label.

>This seems perfectly fair to me and I don't understand the controversy. Maybe in the US people see "State Affiliated" as some kind of an insult?

From Twitter's definition

Yes. That is an insult.

From their definition from a week ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https://help.twit...

> 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. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled.

> State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.

Note that that copy is currently still live on the China specific version of the page: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia...

I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and using only the most current one. Policies get updated over time and that's okay. It's a good thing for organizations to change their mind, update and improve policies.

The thing is here it's dumb no matter what version of the policy you look at lmao

Mostly because the amount of money we're talking about from NPR where including indirect funds (Government -> NPR Affliates -> NPR + Government -> NPR) reaches single digits whereas the majority of BBC funding comes from the TV license legislation enforced by the government and Al Jazeera has an undisclosed amount of money funding it.

Further a huge amount of media outlets worldwide receive money from the government in the realm of single digits and yet are not slapped with the same label, NPR is only being equated to organisations like the BBC here who are truly on a different level in terms of being "state affiliated".

NPR could very conceivably leave all of its government funding behind and not hurt all that much as a result. Whereas if BBC lost all the TV license funding it would be apocalyptic for the organisation. So regardless of the nominal independence of Al Jazeera and BBC from their respective governments, it's difficult to see them as being as independent in practice. NPR gets far more of its funding from corporate sponsors who in all likelihood have more of an editorial influence over it than the government does. They aren't however listed as "Corporate-affiliated media", which would honestly be both more accurate and more damning to their image. Whereas I really wouldn't claim that BBC or Al Jazeera are "Corporate affiliated media" but I wouldn't hesitate to call them "State affiliated".

I've seen government-funded ads on Twitter. Wouldn't it be ironic if Twitter's revenue share from government sources is larger than NPR's 1-2%?

It's also interesting that we don't see the state affiliated label on SpaceX yet.

Or Tesla, for which government carbon credits makes up roughly the same percentage of revenue that NPR gets from government funding.

Those don't technically come from the government, they come from other car manufacturers. Those car manufacturers could choose to make lower emission vehicles, but instead have chosen to pay Tesla to have Tesla's vehicles count towards their fleet average.

And NPR's funding doesn't technically come from the government, it comes from member stations licensing their content.

"whats good for me, is not good for thee" or some version should be tattooed on Musk's forehead.

It's also interesting that you think SpaceX is a media company

SpaceX streams their launches. Using Musk's definitions, they are therefore a media company and must be labeled as "state affiliated media"

In the context of them posting to Twitter, the Tesla/SpaceX social media team posting links to conteny is not significantly different from an NPR social media team linking to content.

Twitter is serving as a marketing avenue for these companies; either as a value add to Twitter or for "free" because these teams are not clicking on ads.

As more organizations stop posting to Twitter AND Twitter continues to fail to find advertisers, Twitter will be a money and content hole.

My general take on this is that people can make whatever arguments they want about whether NPR is According-To-Hoyle state media (I don't think it is, by the spirit of the term, but it's a gnarly enough question that I wouldn't want to burn a whole thread trying to hash it out).

The real issue here is: if Twitter is going to continue to be ad-sponsored for commercial viability, running a social media platform that chases National Public Radio off is very bad for business. You already have major national brands hesitant to re-engage there (whether you like their reasons or not). Playing chicken with NPR and losing is an awfully powerful arrow to put in the anti-Twitter quiver at those companies.

I wouldn't want to look at this through the lens of politics, so much as just plain mismanagement. It's part of a broader theme of Twitter, which depends utterly on user-generated content, doing things to deliberately antagonize the minority of their user base that actually produces content people want to see.

State affiliated media indicates state run media... i.e. propaganda for the State. NPR is in no way propaganda for the State. It's probably the furthest a media outlet could be from such a thing. This as an example of people putting their own political ideologies above all else and labeling the things that don't necessarily support them as propaganda. It's wrong and short sighted.

Do you have any examples of them bucking the DNC establishment? I’ve never seen one. AFAICT state propaganda is exactly what they are.

State propaganda and party propaganda are the same thing in some countries, but fortunately not in the US.

Are you genuinely asking for examples, or are you just declaring your opinion in bad faith?

NPR reports on DNC mishaps and criminals all the time:

- https://www.npr.org/2017/11/16/564593737/sen-al-franken-accu...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/12/505309059...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/19/529119721...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/04/568336597...

- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/02/20/172480780...

I don't have a strong view on this yet, but I think some links that are less than 5 years old would make your argument more compelling.

Agree, if there are not even 5 solid examples from the last 5 years, that's pretty suggestive.

There haven't been criminal convictions of federal democratic politicians in the last 5 years to report on.

Also, it's moving the goal posts.

GP asked for literally any critical reporting. You missed the goal posts, they didn’t move.

GP can provide non-NPR examples over the last five years maybe and cross-corelate with any NPR coverage to prove their point? I disagree, this is moving goalposts.

GP asked for critical articles and received them. Changing the requirements to be for the last five years is moving the goalposts, by way of a no-true-scotsman.

Take it as you will, but the example they give is:

> For example, NPR joined with other media organizations to press the Obama administration for access to closed hearings involving detainees held by U.S. authorities at Guantanamo Bay

NPR are totally propaganda for the State, 100%, without reservation. (I used to be a regular listener, back when they were tolerable)

One would've expected a much larger shift in reporting with changing governments if that were true.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) receives about half a billion dollars annually from Federal grants, and then channels that funding into subsidiaries like PBS and NPR.

https://cpb.org/appropriation/history

Funding from a benefactor is known to create bias.

I'm concerned about NPR's statements which almost resembles some kind of pathology, because the statements look like a mix of denial and/or rationalisation. We are seeing outright denial, that they only get a little bit of federal funding... or rationalisation like that funding is just a small portion of our tiny budget...

The fact is that in 2021 Public Radio received about ~$100 Million, and about the same in 2022. If these estimation are wrong, they are leaning towards the conservative side, and would likely go higher. I'm pulling the data from the CPB financial statements, and mostly glossing over the details, yanking data from the executive summary.

https://cpb.org/sites/default/files/aboutcpb/financials/audi...

Please, by all means dispute this data. I'd love to be persuaded that this is all somehow wrong. But right now it looks like NPR & PBS are both affiliated with the Federal government because they get significant funding from there, alongside donations.

I'm not going to dispute the data, but I don't think it means what you're saying it does. Honestly, I think you've made the same mistake that most people make in this conversation and equating NPR to Public Radio. NPR is Public Radio, but not all Public Radio is NPR.

TL;DR: Based on the document you linked to the lions share of the money goes to _public radio stations_ in unrestricted grants to pay for their operations. Of the money that does trickle through that to program providers, NPR is only one of dozens of program producers and distributors, and NPR's own reporting on this seems to accurately portray the reality of how they are funded from independent stations.

Looking at the second link you provided theses are the expenditure programs that look related to public radio broadcasting in the us: Radio Program Fund, National program production and acquisition grants, Community service grants, and Public broadcasting interconnection system. There may be expenses in other categories but they don't appear to be directly related to public radio.

According to that document, these programs are:

Radio Program Fund represents expenses for the development and production of high-quality, new and innovative radio programs that might not otherwise be supported by the marketplace.

National program production and acquisition grants are restricted grants made to qualified public radio stations that must be used for the production, acquisition, promotion or distribution of national radio programs that are of high quality, creative and reflect society’s diversity.

Community service grants are unrestricted general operating grants made to qualified public television and radio stations.

Public broadcasting interconnection system [...] a new interconnection system to be used by both public television and radio stations to transmit and receive programming feeds [... as well as] “other technologies and services that create infrastructure and efficiencies within the public media system.

The line item breakdowns on these services for 2022 are Radio Program fund: 7,145,925 National program production and acquisition grants: 24,579,081 Radio community service grants: 72,446,561 Public broadcasting interconnection: 2,871,313 Total: 107,042,880

So it looks like the CPB spends slightly over 107M on _public radio_ in the united states.

Note that the "National program production and acquisition grants" specifically go to qualified public radio stations. NPR isn't a public radio station, and so doesn't directly get any of that money. That money would go to a local public radio station (here's a [list](https://radiostationusa.fm/formats/public)). A station like my own WMFE then would use that grant money to purchase a radio program like All Things Considered from NPR. But they might also use that money to purchase a radio program like Marketplace from APM, or This American Life from PRX, or be used to produce it's own programs like WBUR's Here and Now. So that money _might_ go back to NPR, but it might not.

The same thing applies to the Radio community service grants, they're unrestricted grants to _stations_ so NPR _might_ get some of that money but much of it probably go to pay local expenses, like the salaries of the radio engineers who keep the towers up and running.

What about the Radio Program fund? That looks like it's pretty much targeted to NPR. Certainly not 100% of it is going to NPR's new programming. Even being generous all de-funding this will do is specifically cut programs "that might not otherwise be supported by the marketplace". I suspect most of that money goes to things like The Splendid Table, and Growing Bolder (neither are NPR shows btw). Unless you want to argue with Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner that news isn't a marketable product?

The Public broadcasting interconnection is paid to _stations_ to make physically acquiring content easier and a deal with NPR, APM, PRI, PRX and others reduced that cost _significantly_, so that line item dropped to 2M in 2022 from 78M in 2021.

Nothing in your document I believe NPR _claims_ they get about 13% of that portion of a station's budget (based on [WMFE's 2021 Audit](https://drive.google.com/file/d/121U2UFSI8eNYUg59TnZtELEhBL-...) "program acquisition" was about 16% of their total budget so NPR seems credible here) … so about ~$12M of the CPB funding, add in a chunk of the Radio Program fund let's say 80% or ~$6M … we're still at about $18M of the $107M … plus another 1% direct funding (or is that 1% the Radio Program fund?) and we're around 20% of the total CPB "public radio" budget ends up in NPR. Since the CPB's "public radio" budget is only about 25% of the total expenses from the CPB … is 5% of the CPBs expenses considered "significant funding"?

De-funding "public radio" won't mean that Morning Edition goes off the air, it means that the farm report for Ida Grove, IA goes off the air … and the wildfire reports for Billings MT … and close to home for me it means that Brendan Byrne won't be able to keep doing Are We There Yet and reporting on the rockets that keep going up funding my local community with something _other_ than tourism.

The numbers aren't wrong, your definition of "public radio" is wrong when you assume it's just NPR.

How on earth can anyone say "falsely labeled"? NPR does get money from the federal government, that is an undisputable fact. How are they not "state-affilated"? I don't care how small a % of the budget is money from the government. The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

In their rebuttal [0] to this, they cited a statement from the White House Press Secretary:

> When asked about Twitter's decision during the White House's daily briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to address Twitter's content rules specifically. But she also defended NPR's journalism.

> "There is no doubt of the independence of NPR journalists," Jean-Pierre said. "If you've ever been on the receiving end of their questions, you know this."

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-...

How ironic that NPR uses the state's talking points to argue they're not affiliated with the state.

"yet you participate in society. curious!"

If you read more [1] you'll see that NPR used several sources' talking points in its story.

So in this context who better? Also it's not like they received a real response from Twitter when they asked:

"In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks."

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-...

By this logic, Tesla is also "state-affiliated". A huge amount of companies in this country receive government subsidies, are they all "state-affiliated" media? The NPR journalists act independently from any government oversight, they are not part of the government's media apparatus

Tesla's not exactly a media company, but in general, always "follow the money"

Great, so you agree that Tesla and SpaceX must also be labeled as state-affiliated, right? And of course every single company that took PPP money, and...

Twitter’s policy seems to specifically mention “media” accounts. Not just any business.

And it's the prerogative of any media company to take issue with that and stop using Twitter.

And what purpose would that serve? Tesla is not a media company. It doesn't publish news and it doesn't claim to be objective. Nobody is interested in how their sources of funding might bias their coverage of events because that's completely irrelevant to a car company

> The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

In that case, very nearly every business (including mom and pop shops) is "state affiliated" and one has to ask why NPR is being singled out for this.

> In that case, very nearly every business (including mom and pop shops)

How so? In what capacity are “most businesses” getting federal money? Tax credits/breaks don’t count, that is the companies money that they don’t have to pay, not the federal government directly funding the business.

Twitter's own definition of "state-affiliated media" reads as follows:

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.

By this definition, NPR is not state-affiliated.

COMPETES act stuffed 500M for state sponsored anti-PRC propaganda. By that definition all US media should be default suspect of being state affliated. Or charitably state influenced / infiltrated.

The name twitter was looking for is 'public broadcasting' which is crucially different to 'state media'

You expect me to believe that gov funding NPR receives is “no strings attached”. LOL yeah right.

If NPR was as upstanding as some think, and if this money isn't meaningful as claimed, then why is it so hard for NPR to give the money back and distance themselves in a way that leaves no room for question about being propaganda?

with that logic, wouldn't corporations who take subsidies and tax credits be considered "state-affiliated"?

just slap that label on every single food product.

> The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

Let's leave out the Elno companies that take gov money hand over fist, why is this label not applied to every company that gets tax benefits, took out govt loans?

So if you were, say, a restaurant where your local park rangers held their annual employee appreciation dinner, you are now state affiliated?

> The fact they take any money at all from the gov makes them sate-affilated.

All this demonstrates is that you don't know what "state affiliated" actually means.

The contrast is between NPR, PBS, BBC, etc., and, say, Russia Today.

The difference between these is obvious.

I think folks who don’t follow the media industry would be surprised how much federal money makes its way around. The U.S. military alone has an annual marketing budget over $400 million, most of which goes to media companies.

There is also the 2nd order effect of major government contractors who spend heavily on brand advertising, which is in turned funded by revenue from government contracts. NPR actually gets most of its “government funding” this way, as private membership dues from local radio stations (who themselves receive some federal grants).

Personally what matters to me is editorial independence from the government, not where single digits of revenue come from. And NPR is undeniably as editorially self-directed as any other media company.

By that logic, SpaceX gets most of its money from the federal government, therefore it is "state-affiliated."

SpaceX actually gets significantly more money, in absolute and relative terms, of its budget from the federal government than NPR.

Okay, so when big media corps get cut deals by government, are they now state-affiliated? Is Disney state-affiliated, with no editorial independence, because Florida had granted them their own little kingdom? Your post might as well say: "I don't care what the facts are, my minds made up that NPR is a mouthpiece for the state." It's just not at all true. Stations pay for NPR content, and stations are member driven, despite subsidy. The federal government has no more say in NPRs content than anyone else's.

> Is Disney state-affiliated

Yes, clearly.

If every source was judged by that standard, and the accounts of media conglomerates such as Disney were also flagged as state affiliated, I could get on board with that, maybe. But it risks being a useless qualification at that point.

Since it's tax season... Did you ever benefit from a tax credit on your return? Should we consider you state-affiliated?

Less than 1% of their funding is from the government.

Tesla received billions in government subsidies... Is it state-affiliated?

One could say that Voice Of America is state-affiliated. One cannot say the same of NPR.

"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he says. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

Welcome to the club.

Is NPR state funded? (real question - I actually don't know). What is the definition of state funded? Here in Canada all the media take government subsidies especially the big ones - a lot of that I think is the economics, they simply don't generate enough revenue on their own to sustain themselves so in the process of being subsidized by the federal govt they take on the viewpoint that can be considered statist. You just can't bite the hand that feeds you. The step that comes before independence of thoughts has to be independence of economics.

> Is NPR state funded?

Yes, in part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR?useskin=vector#Funding :

"According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB; in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources."

"about 50% of NPR revenues come from the fees it charges member stations"

"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% of their budget comes from CPB, which is federal funding for local radio stations, and which NPR gets the money through local stations. They downplay this funding source and only mention the 1-4% that they get directly from local/state/federal government sources but clearly NPR would be dead without federal funding.

[1] https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/does-npr-receive-less-1-its...

> 34% of their budget comes from CPB

No. 34% goes to affiliate stations. A portion of that 34% goes to NPR indirectly through the fees they charge the affiliates to carry the programming.

The affiliates are not NPR.

You are quoting that source incorrectly:

>In its 2019 fiscal year, direct federal grants provided 0.6% of funding for National Public Radio... NPR does derive support indirectly, through payments from member stations that also get direct federal funding.

> NPR relies on the local stations' payments for 34% of its budget. CPB estimates its support provided 8.2% of the average station's budget in 2017, but it's more important to affiliates in smaller, rural markets

This is still wrong though. From your source:

> NPR relies on the local stations' payments for 34% of its budget.

Local stations are not 100% government funded.

> CPB estimates its support provided 8.2% of the average station's budget in 2017, but it's more important to affiliates in smaller, rural markets.

If I do the math. An average station's budget is 8.2% from CPB, and 34% of the funding for NPR comes from local stations, taking that 8.2% of government money, and saying 8.2% of the 34% funding from local station it is 2.7% of NPR's budget from local stations. And 0.6% directly, so from _your source_ NPR is funded by 3.1% from CPB.

Here's Twitter's old definition of who is and isn't "state-affiliated". They have since changed it. Note that NPR was literally used as an example of someone who receives state funds but is not "state-affiliated".

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

It's not just that it's state-funded - NPR's CEO got there after years of heading the relevant US government propaganda agency, as evidenced in https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/management-team/john-lansin....

So is your argument that NPR is a mouthpiece for the US government? I think that requires some evidence, rather than flinging about flimsy associations like this.

No, my argument is that an institution managed by past government officials cannot be unironically called independent from said government.

So every institution employing former government officials are state affiliated? Or does this just apply to ones you don't like?

either would be silly tbh

s/employing/led by/. Yeah, pretty much.

"Tesla has received more than $3.2 billion worth of direct and indirect California subsidies and market mechanisms since 2009, according to an estimate from Newsom's office." - https://www.govtech.com/policy/gov-newsom-says-california-su....

Well, there is an interesting history here. E.g. in 2000 NPR (and CNN) allowed the US Army's Psychological Operations division to place military members in the newsroom as interns as part of a media training program:

https://fair.org/home/psyops-in-the-newsroom/

> "PSYOPS is a division of the U.S. Army mandated to “develop and disseminate propaganda designed to lower the morale” of “enemy forces,” and to “build support among the civil population” in other countries for U.S. objectives (U.S. Army Field Manual No. 100-15)."

I'm fairly certain that if a Russian media company had a history of hosting Russian military psyops people in its newsroom, or if hired ex-military and ex-intelligence officers as commentators, it'd get the 'state-affiliated' label on platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc. without any controversy.

Yes, but the United States are the Good Guys, so their propaganda outlets must not get the label identifying them as such.

The 'state-affiliated' label is a bludgeon that the US gets to use, not get used against the US haha.

Please, in Soviet Russia interns tell you what to do. (I'm sorry, that was a terrible Yakov Smirnoff reference, I apologize to him and to anyone reading this.)

Anyway, in the USA military interns at NPR are learning how to run a radio station or whatever. I mean, if the military tried to tell NPR what to say there would be howls from coast to coast.

- - - -

And now I have read the article you linked to, and it does sound like there may have been some influence from OPD to NPR. As I would expect, when this came to light, there was howling from coast to coast, and it got shut down right quick. In fact, the article says the whole OPD was shut down. Good. (WTF people?)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger

"Cable Network News (CNN) and National Public Radio, (NPR) denied that the "psy-ops" officers influenced news coverage and said the internships had been stopped as soon as senior managers found out . For its part, the army said the programme was only intended to give young army media specialists some experience of how the news industry functioned."

That...seems like a pretty reasonable explanation?

Just to be clear, the alternative theory you have is that the US government wanted to influence NPR's coverage, and thought the best, most inconspicuous way to do so would be by using an intern placement program targeting Army media officers?

The point they’re making is the point they’re making. Take it exactly for what it is. If the same thing was reported to have happened In Russia, it wouldn’t be terribly controversial to label the media outlet “state-sponsored”.

I'd perhaps distinguish between 'state-sponsored' (i.e. all the operating funds come from a government) and 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

If MSNBC hires a Biden spokesperson (Jen Psaki) or if CNN hires a intelligence officer (e.g. James Clapper) or if Fox hires a White House communications director (Hope Hicks), that's 'state-affiliated' in the same sense that if RT hired Putin's press secretary or some FSB/GU officer we'd say, 'oh, right, they're state-affiliated.'

News reports are more reliable if the people reporting on government activities are not themselves from the government, it's called an independent press and is generally held to be a critical component of democratic systems.

There’s another aspect you have to consider: the power dynamic. If MSNBC hired Jen Psaki or Fox News hired Hope Hicks because she got sick of working in government, they might have a bias towards their former colleagues but it would be voluntary and clearly a job either would be qualified for. That’s pretty different from, say, Russian government going to RT and giving them a list of qualified candidates or even, say, the Tories appointing their loyalists to the BBC because the decision isn’t being made by the government and there isn’t a threat explicit or implicit that there would be consequences for not hiring them.

Another power dynamic to consider is that MSNBC or FOX have owners (Comcast and Murdoch respectively) and those owners have shareholders (Blackrock, Fidelity etc.) who also have holdings in corporations that get their revenue from government contracts (Lockheed etc.) and so MSNBC executives feel pressure to hire employees who will generally take a positive view on the delivery of large government contracts to corporations, government-structured tax breaks and bailouts for corporations, and so on, and of course a government employee with an eye on possibly returning to a government career is an acceptable option, because they will promote the opinion that this is a great system that doesn't need say, more audits or investigation into misappropriation of public funds and so on.

Now the word for this kind of integration of the corporate world and the government world is....?

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini

> 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

By that definition, every company in every significant industry is "state affiliated".

Yes, that's mostly true. In terms of the tendency of government regulators to have been ex-corporate middle managers, this is called 'the revolving door'.

It's insane to me that we're all just supposed to give a US army program literally titled PSYOPS the benefit of the doubt because their corporate partners said there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone remember that the entire mainstream media was in full support of everything the bush administration did in the middle east, NPR included?

I remember. I don't think it was because of some unpaid interns in the mail room or whatever.

I think this kind of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy theorizing trivializes the real, challenging, human issues of editorial independence, the complexity of fairly representing reality, etc, etc.

We must have very different trust levels in the military industrial complex then. I think it's worth pointing out this program happened in 2000. Do you think it just went away? Do you think that when obama legalized spreading propaganda in the US no one capitalized on it?

I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.

> I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.

I totally agree that an over-emphasis on "access" leads to inaccurate reporting. You're certainly right to tie that to the invasion of Iraq.

But I don't think there's any evidence that the US military is running domestic psyops, and certainly if they were doing so it would not be via unpaid internships.

Of course there are broader problems. A lack of trust in the media and a lack of attention span--no doubt driven by social media intermediation and a lack of accountability for individual publishers--reduces incentives to get stories correct, and increases incentives to get stories. A public that misunderstands the role of reporters thinks analysis equals bias and is obsessed with up-to-the-minute stories, and high production values--the latter of which can only be afforded in large metro and national markets, leading to a hollowing out of local content.

These aren't original observations, of course. But they are indeed real problems. I think they have very little to do with the prospect of Pentagon psyops, which, frankly, are unnecessary given the underlying structural flaws.

Plenty of evidence spanning decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/06/john-bren... I immensely enjoy the opinion of the mainstream that "yes the CIA did bad things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s but nobody was ever prosecuted an there were no reforms so now they don't do bad things today you conspiracy theorist."

I must be getting different webpages when I click those links than you do. Do you think it’s the cia?

Several years after Nixon's resignation,[0] Carl Bernstein published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that over the course of 25 years, the CIA had tasked more than 400 journalists for special assignments, including Pulizer Prize winnders and a publisher for the New York Times.

"Some of these..relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services-from simple intelligence gather to serving as go-betweens."

Laundering information.

[0] https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-... [1] CIA Officer Frank Snepp discusses planting stories in Vietnam: youtu.be/UwerBZG83YM

Isn't it interesting that a few months ago a few people in twitter spaces were shouting to the world that twitter ITSELF had backchannels to govt and payments and thus was also state affiliated media? What about that?

Considering Musk has openly endorsed Russia's talking points, his changes don't surprise me. Such a shame to see Twitter destroyed completely.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2023/04/07/elon-musk-...

For what it's worth, I'll give some perspective here as a career Army officer.

I think this is one of those things that sounds like the plausible work of a highly intelligent and effective monolith, which is how conspiracy theorists often seem to view "the government." I think the reality is that "the government" and the US Army is not. It's a sprawling bureaucracy with insanely high turnover and many internal divisions, in which every sub-organization has its own goals, and people are operating independently at every level of those sub-organizations (and mostly to advance their personal career goals which are often quite limited, like making it to a 20-year active duty retirement or 30-year FERS civilian retirement, getting an education, and transitioning to a good job in the private sector as soon as possible).

2000 was before my time, but this sounds like a program which still exists called "Training With Industry." The ideas behind TWI are that: (1) The Army has people in uniform who've been working hard and doing good things, feeling burned out, and are on the fence about whether they should continue in uniform or find another career path. (2) The Army would like to retain their valuable experience and expertise. (3) Letting people do an internship in private industry for a year, trying out "civilian life," on the condition that they do three more years in uniform afterwards, might be a win-win. It gives people a break and something nice to put on their resume for later. They learn and experience some things from the internship that the Army can't teach. It's like offering a sabbatical more than anything else. The Army lets people go to civilian graduate school for a year or two for the same reasons. My main point is that it's very divorced from the operational side of the Army, even though it's placing people in companies or graduate school programs that relate to their operational career fields.

Your arguments are cogent, but it's still 'state-affiliated media' - I mean, that also applies to the whole 'media embedding program' that got started in Desert Storm (Gulf War I, or perhaps II if we count the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s).

Independent media is not necessarily adversarial to government, but it can't be dependent on government or it turns into nothing but the propaganda arm of the government. E.g. reporting on military failures is necessary, even if this upsets the brass because it damages morale.

I think the embedded media program is much more problematic than TWI. Embedded media is at the invitation and discretion of operational public affairs officers and commanders, and those public affairs officers and commanders absolutely have operational "themes" and "messages" that they want to have broadcasted. I just finished Michael Hastings' book The Operators and he describes in-depth the dilemma for a reporter.

But TWI is run by human resources wonks, and mostly for the benefit of the individuals participating. Frankly, it's disparaged by a lot of operational commanders who think those individuals should be serving in the mud somewhere instead of padding their personal resumes. I will concede, however, that there is a certain level of coziness between the Army and the companies that take TWI participants. In the IT community, for example, the Army buys a lot of stuff from Microsoft and Cisco, and Microsoft and Cisco host TWI participants. It makes sense in terms of the Army and those companies wanting to learn more about each other.

"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he says. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

Translation: We saw a great opportunity to generate some profitable controversy but will likely be back on twitter in a few months.

So much of this article reads like an op-ed that I can't take it seriously.

Edit: for the downvoters, some excerpts:

> The BBC exchange showed Musk as alternately conciliatory and erratic.

According to whom?

> He also said that he's sleeping on a couch at work, that he followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter only because a judge forced him to, and that he should stop tweeting after 3 a.m.

this is a lot to say without any specific quotes

> Like so many policy decisions at the social network of late, Musk applied the label to NPR's Twitter account abruptly. It's still not clear why he became so animated about the issue.

Heavy use of adverbs and adjectives is like injecting opinion.

> For years, many journalists considered Twitter critical to monitoring news developments, to connect with people at major events and with authoritative sources, and to share their coverage. Musk's often hastily announced policy changes have undermined that.

Again, according to who??

If you want "objective" just watch the BBC interview?

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.

By his logic, Tesla should be labeled as "Government-funded Car Company".

Headline is incorrect. NPR’s label at the time of their departure was “government-funded media”. Changed after Musk conceded he got it wrong with the first label “State affiliated media”.

I strongly disagree with the notion that Elon Musk's labeling of NPR as 'state-affiliated' was an innocent mistake. In my opinion, Musk was well aware of the implications of lumping NPR together with propaganda outlets like RT and Xinhua. By doing so, he deliberately misrepresented NPR's journalistic integrity and reputation as a non-partisan news source. It's clear that NPR's objection was not to being labeled 'government-funded,' but rather to being unfairly associated with disreputable media organizations. This was a calculated move by Musk to undermine NPR's credibility and independence.

There’s plenty of skullduggery going on around this situation. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646228065071292416?s=46...

We should all be quitting twitter tbh

Did that the day the sale became final. There is no way I'm going to be associated with anything that Elon Musk does or holds sway over.

Imagine an upgraded version of Musk - making some of these changes in a less contentious way.

I find the idea of labeling media outlets quite helpful. The initial state-affiliated label for NPR seemed like an unnecessary tarnishment. The updated "government-funded" label is better, but still not quite there. The idea elsewhere in this thread of labeling the approximate percentage of government funding is excellent and should not be offensive to anyone involved.

Musk does have the tendency to make "motherhood and apple pie" sound like nuclear war. It seems more about attention seeking than running a business.

Bobby Allyn (Tech Reporter for @NPR):

>NPR's analytics show that less than 2% of our traffic comes from Twitter. It's not a surprise to people who work in media, but even before the labeling saga, there was a pretty strong business case that the game wasn't worth the candle

https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1646195092661891072

I read/listen to NPR daily. Twitter is blocked at my router. My very tech savvy family hasn't even mentioned the block once. Making good choices Mom...

It is a sad state of affairs that being "state-affiliated" is a negative thing.

Thats not necessarily true if its the weather service, post office or whatever. I am no Twitter fan/user, but its a decent format for circulating government announcements that people will actually see.

Interestingly NOAA isn't listed as state media:

https://twitter.com/NOAA

Yeah, that is the hypocrisy.

The argument is that its fair to label NPR as govt funded, because they technically are, but Twitter is not exactly in a hurry to apply this rule anywhere else.

This was the implication of the label from the start, when twitter created it years ago.

That depends a great deal on which state it's affiliated with. How much do you trust that state?

What's sad is that people just automatically assume every government is altruistic when history has proven that to be unequivocally false. There is not ONE government in history that hasn't committed disgusting atrocities against its people.

When you realize that, it becomes clearly easy to see that you ought not put full trust media that is backed by government when every government has used media like this to push evil propaganda on to its citizens.

> citing the social media platform's decision to label NPR "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

it's indeed a shame they do it for chinese and russian companies, but not the BBC or western european broadcasters...

hell, not even Radio Free Europe is marked as "state-affiliated media". If not them, who?

Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such, which has been revised since, but is still archived.

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

but this opens the can of worm of defining "editorial independence". and I think that speaking of State-financed or Publicly-financed is a better.

Sure. But then can we label SpaceX and Tesla as State-Financed? They are both sucking down way more money from the US Gov't than NPR is.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor...

omg yes, between banks bailouts, law mandated insurances, private-pensions plans and companies with a huge public contribution (such as SpaceX); it would finally open the eyes to the public how much of "capitalism" is in fact politically created and directed.

So yes, I really would like to see this.

Agreed! I also would love to see the flip-side and have congressional reps wear logos like in NASCAR. Let's be real fucking clear how many are solidly in the pocket of their corporate "donors".

Editorial independence in action: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/management-team/john-lansin...

you are asserting that having ever worked with the government necessarily means that you are silently, privately doing their editorial bidding on their behalf and I do not think that is reasonable or appropriate

There's a subtle difference between "working with" and being the CEO.

> Twitter themselves had a guide that explained why NPR and BBC were not labelled as such

> "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

That explains the what, not the why. It says they aren't going to consider BBC and NPR as state-affiliated, but not why they aren't going to consider them as state-affiliated. "Editorial independence" is a meaningless superlative that cannot be empirically measured through any means available to twitter.

The "why" is because the "state affiliated" label was meant to be innuendo for "untrustworthy" and twitter, under previous management, did not consider NPR and BBC untrustworthy.

I think it explains the why quite clearly- editorial independence. It's a big deal. NPR is allowed to be critical of the US government in a way that RT is not.

Have you ever considered the possible difference between what's officially allowed and what's actually happening?

Nowadays, when information is abundant, individual stories don't matter all that much; what does matter is building the overall narrative. Allowing critical stories doesn't affect that.

Dear guy who brags about ban evasion in his profile on his 3-month old account: thanks for getting me to check if HN had a block button.

So, does it? xD

I think you should toss this link in your bio so people can see why dang banned you twice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018795

And look how effective that was.

I agree that it was ineffective, that's why I think you should put that link in your bio- I don't think nearly as many people would waste much time talking to you if they were just linked to why you were banned instead of only seeing your biased version of it.

Does anyone still use Twitter? I tried to delete my account a couple years ago (well before people complained of post-musk problems) and couldn't do it.

Not tweeting gives me time to make the award-winning comments [*] I'm known for on this platform.

But seriously, what are people using after leaving Twitter? I just quit social media sites, didn't go anywhere else.

* yes, this is sarcasm.

Mass tow dawn.

Twitter is #5 website by global traffic, according to SimilarWeb (6.6B visits/user sessions in Mar 2023):

I'm Danish and I may have a different take on this than many Americans, but I'm frankly a little appalled that our democratic institutions are still renting their digital homes on the turf of tech giants. The EU set a good example when Elon musk bought Twitter and the EU created their first Mastodon servers, both for it's organizations and it's elected officials, and everyone should frankly follow suit. We shouldn't accept that a billionaire gets to dictate the online content of our democratic institutions, and, especially not when there are easily available alternatives where you can take back the governance. At least that is my opinion on the matter and I hope Elon manages to make this happen by getting people to quit Twitter.

I'm not sure how it is around the world, because I mostly follow our local news on these topics, but it's been sort of silly to watch the Danish debate about TikTok. We've banned public officials from having it on their phones, but we've not banned Twitter, Facebook or any of the other Social Medias that do the exact same things TikTok does. Yes, we're allied with the US, but it's still sort of silly isn't it?. If the NPR is a state affiliated media because it gets public funding, then our primary media institution Danmarks Radio should frankly get the same label since it gets all of it's funding from the public. But why on earth wouldn't our primary media institution not run their own Mastodon server, so they can govern and moderate their own public image instead of being on Twitter? Sure they might lose followers, but we don't pay them public money to be popular on an American Social Media, do we?

Heh. I personally think that what I've said here applies to everyone, every institution and organisation but I can see why it's different for American organisations to be on an American Social Network, but really, isn't it time we took ownership of our online lives back?

I am also Danish, and I agree.

They do this because our federal government is absolutely incapable of doing it themselves. Any tech project (hell, any massive project in general) they undertake goes massively over-budget/over-schedule and is loaded with subcontractor after subcontractor circling overhead like vultures trying to get their piece of the pie. It's why no government at any level is capable of delivering a public works project anymore. It's why so many have so little faith in our governments. No one cares about the end results, they just want to know how they can benefit personally from it and then fuck off

I listen to NPR station in the car. Anecdotally, very little of the content is true journalism; much of it is effectively op-ed. That's not necessarily a bad thing, provived you understand what you're consuming.

The state-funded tag is a bit much. But to claim NPR is a pure journalism play isn't accurate either.

I dont think they claim to be pure journalism:

"NPR is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public. Every day, NPR connects with millions of Americans on the air, online, and in person to explore the news, ideas, and what it means to be human. Through its network of member stations, NPR makes local stories national, national stories local, and global stories personal."

[A] https://www.npr.org/about/ [B] https://www.npr.org/ethics/

I think in their statement about leaving Twitter he mentioned journalism. I was pointing out that - imho - it's mostly op-ed. Nothing wrong with op-ed but it should never be confused with journalism.

My dad used to listen to NPR all the time growing up (WAMU). It was always liberal, but now it’s become this highly processed and refined sort of white sugar liberal that’s hard to stomach even for him.

Happy music and happy words when "preferred" people/ideas are the focus of the story. Sad music and choice words when "bad"/ideas people are the focus of the story.

It's maddening. Artisan hand-crafted propaganda.

NPR and The NYT have both jumped the shark. Sad really. Tho sadder is the fact that they're in denial about it.

By definition they're state funded, but not state ran. The implications from the optics though may result in extreme takes. Though we could assume there's at least some influence the funding has.

Exxon gets a larger percentage of its income from the federal government in subsidies, yet we seldom (if ever) apply "government funded" to that organization.

What's your definition of "state funded"?

I'm saying that technically, yes, they are receiving state funds, regardless of amount, and if the label is going to be applied then it should be applied to all company accounts receiving government subsidies, Exxon and others included.

My stance is that if twitter, youtube, and the likes are going to be using these labels on accounts, then they should apply them to all organizations universally without bias/singling out of individual industries. Either apply across the board going by a technical definition, or don't apply them at all.

Not being snarky but...maybe we should label them as such. If it's accurate then so be it.

The irony? We'd have to rely on the media and "modern journalism" to apply the proper labels.

So Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City get labeled as "government funded?"

Yes

If they were truly state run, they would have been supportive of the past president... which they definitely weren't.

My comment clearly states "by definition". I'm going by the technicality, though I do agree with you that if there was any sway at all due to this funding, it's been minimal and did not reflect in the previous presidency.

NPR is not meaningfully state funded. They get less than 1% of their funding directly from the government. Local NPR affiliates get more, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. On average about 1/3 of their funding comes from the government, and a portion of that goes to NPR in the form of licensing fees for their programming.

In the end, erring on the side of overestimating the amount of government money going to NPR, it appears to be less than 10%. That is substantially less than a whole lot of other companies get, and those companies aren't considered "government sponsored".

> By definition

I was going by technicality, but am aware of those numbers and agree. Also, it's my belief that it should be applied to all companies receiving government funds, or shouldn't be applied at all.

What's your definition of journalism?

This is handy for me:

https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...

https://www.mixdexhq.com/tv-news/here-are-jim-lehrers-10-rul...

> very little of the content is true journalism; much of it is effectively op-ed

What is your alternative for a true journalism / non op-ed radio news station?

Other than some tech sites and link aggregators / discussion forums (hello hackernews), I limit my news-reading to the AP and Reuters sites. But I’d be interested in learning about radio-based news sources, provided that they’re either accessible in my area or online.

The problem with NPR right now is that good content and content creators get snatched up immediately by bigger organizations once they gain any traction at NPR.

Joshua Johnson and his show 1A was the main case of this for me. The guy was running a top-notch show before NBC yoinked him up to the big leagues.

Makes ya wonder if they're acquiring the person for the person, or to gain control of the ideas that person is able to promote, or not.

Well they literally are, and combined with being as biased and disingenuous as any MSM organization out there, they should be labeled as such. Twitter has become much better since Musk took the helm. The little people can finally speak truth to power without getting deplatformed.

It's labeled "Government-funded Media".

As with many recent Musk impulsive changes, it's being rapidly revised, and looks to be changing again soon.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196

> And he confirmed Twitter will change its newly added label for the BBC's account from "government funded media" to say it is "publicly funded" instead.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-... has a screenshot of the "state-affiliated" tag that was recently present.

Ninja editing this stuff is par for the course at Twitter, as are impromptu decisions, reversals of those decisions and reversals of the reversals. If you want to keep track of stuff you need to screenshot and timestamp it.

This will surely bring advertisers rushing through the doors!

According to https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affilia... 'state-affiliated media' and 'government-funded media' are two distinct labels on Twitter.

Most western countries have media comparable to NPR. In the UK that would be BBC, in Italy there is Rai, in Spain RTVE, in Portugal RTP and in Germany there is ARD. That makes me believe that they warrant their own label.

The BBC isn't comparable to NPR. The Chairman of the BBC is appointed by the UK's King-in-Council, on the advice of the Secretary of State. Similarly, RAI is owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance; RTVE is state owned. Not sure on RTP and ARD; they sound more NPR-ish from their Wikipedias, although ARD appears to be paid for by a mandatory license fee like the BBC is.

That is a bit my point. The details differ and the naming differs but I'd argue that by and large and in the broad public perception there are three categories: Privately-owned commercial, state controlled and a third category that is really neither. Regardless of the details and legalities people know it when they see it, so an own label would be justified.

BBC clearly meets certain definitions of "state controlled" and NPR does not meet any. BBC itself cannot sack its chairman. Only the government can appoint and remove them.

There is significant controversy on the current one , how his appointment came about and links to then PM Boris Johnson.

Also recent controversy over Match of the day program presenter Gary Lineker on twitter(!) comparing government language on immigration to the ones used by Nazis and his suspension following that .

Given all this it is fair to say they are government controlled

> BBC clearly meets certain definitions of "state controlled".

I disagree with that. Every media is under pressure of influencing forces and sometimes mistakes are made, but throwing out the baby with the bath water and classifying the BBC as "state controlled" is clearly unjustified.

I've long thought that a service like Twitter is a public utility and should be run in a democratic way with government funding. The tragedy of Twitter only confirms that. I hope that a billionaire creates a Twitter clone and grants oversight to it to a democratically elected government body. I don't think it should have ads, because that would give advertisers influence. I think we should all fund it so we the public and have a public square for discussion that is neutral. We can all debate what kind of speech that we allow and vote on that

It should be labeled as such considering it has received massive tax breaks and free rent from the City and County of San Francisco.

I'd support the Federal Government nationalizing Twitter. We live in a time of war after all, mostly cold fought on a cyber and informational front, but just as serious just the same. Musk has suppressed support of Ukraine on Twitter and boosted Russia supporting accounts. I think that's just wrong. I think it's obvious by now Musk can't be trusted.

Only state-affiliated media from countries we don't like, such as China and Russia, should be considered state-affiliated media. BBC and NPR get a pass. [/irony]

They will look cool to a certain group of people momentary but it will hurt them in the long run.

The average user won't even notice their tweets are missing from their feed.

this is true for any account, especially since algorithmic sorting was introduced and then amplified with the introduction of 'For You'.

Each of these announcements shifts the window of discourse[1]. Not too long ago, the idea that a major news organization would leave Twitter was almost unthinkable. Now its just one of many departures and even more are on the fence.

It's also a great opportunity for networks like Mastodon to pick up steam and mindshare.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Maybe, but like it didn't hurt Fox https://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-breaks-16-month-twitter-sil...

Since only about 25% of the US population pays any attention to Twitter, I think that you're correct -- the average person won't notice NPR's tweets are missing.

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.

Distilled down to its most basic argument -the question becomes: can an institution that receives funding from a sponsor also claim that its output is independent of that sponsor's interests?

My perception is that NPR serves specific class interests, not State interests per se. Unfortunately for them, the State also serves the same narrow class interests. Rage-quitting will not address the underlying tension.

I’d say no. All of these corporate media outlets have the same conflict of interest (Fox, MSNBC, etc) and the result is unsurprising.

Talk about rage quitting. They'll be back.

And whether it's unpopular or not, CPB gets federal and state grants for part of their operating budgets . Technically state funded or affiliated in the same way auto makers get government contracts.

I don't know why they are mad about the designation. Whether it implies bias or not, it's true they get state funds, ergo they are state funded media.

Wait wasn't the whole debacle that Twitter had special access to govt and received money for them regarding postings? Isn't twitter then also state affiliated media?

Wahwahwhatabout! We're talking about NPR, not Twitter. And the designation doesn't matter.

Do you mean the twitter files conspiracy theory? That didn't happen, and if it did, it was totally normal, and if it wasn't, it was justified.

The issue is that they are marked as state affiliated, not state funded.

And i support every company that receive state funds, directly or via tax breaks to be called 'state funded company'. That would have interesting repercussions.

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.

I think Twitters' main criteria currently is "Has <@anyone> been saying mean things that Elon Musk doesn't like lately?"

NPR is indeed a propaganda machine. But only for one party, and its woke ideology. It doesn't even have to receive federal funding to acknowledge that. Now the technical question is what label do you put on a media platform that's captured by an ideology favorable to a single party which comes to power every few years?

> Now the technical question is what label do you put on a media platform that's captured by an ideology favorable to a single party which comes to power every few years?

Without agreeing that that is actually true of NPR, the most accurate label would be “typical private media”, virtually all of which has an ideological viewpoint shaped by the interests (commercial and/or otherwise) of its principals (and, often by way of those commercial interests, those of its sponsors.)

> what label do you put on a media platform that's captured by an ideology favorable to a single party which comes to power every few years?

a dog logo

https://twitter.com/logout

It is, since 2015-2016 its just awful. I used to love NPR, listening to is everyday in the 2000s and first half of 2010s, love the podcasts. SOMETHING happened, and it took a whole year or so for almost everything to be focused on politics and race and trump and I just completely lost interest.

A fascist took office, and now more fascists are taking office. When the fascists go, the news can be boring again.

anyone who says 'fascist' that many times in one line wont be able to convince me of anything

obama and bush took office way before 2015.

I've been uncomfortable with the uneven application of those labels. I think they are a good idea and should be applied to all government sponsored media. It should be basic transparency, instead of a selective scary warning.

It's too bad we don't get a real experiment in trying to run a social network like Twitter on a skeleton crew. It would have been interesting to see the impact of sane moderation rules, but on 75% staff reduction.

Who gets to say what is sane moderation? Sane is not something I would ascribe to Musk.

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-ra...

To be fair they are, independent investigations have found around 20-40% of NPR's money comes from the US government in one form or another. I agree it's a bit ambiguous where the cutoff should lie though

Twitter will probably, eventually find a more appropriate label for high-quality public media sources, and NPR will probably find their way back, since it doesn't cost them anything. On the other hand, the current kerfuffle just scratches the surface of their current labeling approach's weirdness.

Propublica's twitter page is labelled "Media and News Company," but that's a label they applied to themselves, not something Twitter applies. Okay, fair enough. Some other for-profit or nonprofit news organizations don't have any labels at all, so clearly it's not mandatory. The distinction between something like Propublica and something like The Washington Post is significant to someone who cares about news, but maybe not to Twitter's censors.

Voice of America is still on there and is, reasonably, labelled "government-funded media." But BBC is not not labelled at all, with any label, because... Elon Musk liked their reporter? Or something?

NPR lost the influence that it once had on Twitter, controlling narrative that suited their political ideology. So, it quit. That's great new for Twitter.

NPR is far worse than a state-affiliated media. Its coverage during the riots and protests following the accidental murder of George Floyd focused on "racially disproportionate policing". It wasn't journalism. It was BLM protest using NPR as a microphone. There wasn't a single show that discussed crime statistics. Policing methods were discussed to the extent that it suited the narrative that cops in America are a racist militant group.

> It wasn't journalism. It was BLM protest using NPR as a microphone.

Sounds like journalism to me. Journalism has never meant nor implied 'impartial reporting.'

> that it suited the narrative that cops in America are a racist militant group.

I mean, they are, so where's the lie?

It would be more noteworthy if their reporters left Twitter.

It's an active and current discussion.

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646154796905136128

> Steve Inskeep (NPR): John Lansing, NPR CEO, at the ⁦ @MorningEdition meeting.

> NPR says it will de-emphasize Twitter. Aside from the misleading label, NPR says Twitter isn’t used by most Americans; drives little traffic to NPR; and “no longer has the public service relevance that it once had.”

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646155432124137474

> Steve Inskeep (NPR): NPR employees with personal accounts are told they may make their own decisions. I’ll take it day by day.

https://twitter.com/abbydphillip/status/1646166679032938501

> Abby D. Phillip (CNN) replying to morning edition meeting: At the news org level, this makes sense. And even at the reporter level, we’d all be better served spending less time on here, because the conversations happening here are increasingly divorced from what’s happening in the real world.

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/1646202479988686855

> Steve Inskeep (NPR) replying to Abby: This captures something real. While I am not stepping away at this time (I read all sorts of sources!), Twitter always encouraged groupthink; has never captured the full range of what’s going on; and is a less valuable resource than a year ago. I’ve been on here less.

I'm not sure what NPR is complaining about, they themselves state that federal funding is "essential" (in bold) for them.

I mean, have you listened to NPR lately? It’s too much for me, a longtime listener, to tolerate the majority of the editorial content, these days.

Good. Maybe more companies, media/new outlets will quit and be forced to realize that pandering to the amen chorus on Twitter is bad for business.

Can we go back to RSS with great apps to get our news?

This is how I get my news. Not every news source has an Atom or RSS feed, but plenty of aggregating sites (like HN I might note) do have feeds. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this now. But apparently, this is not how the masses want to consume media, including news media.

To be fair, all private media should have a “corporate ad funded” label, or maybe better yet, a list of their top 5 ad purchasers.

That would indicate many high-quality news outlets.

Many European countries have state-funded but independent media. Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, France, et al, all have state-funded and independent media.

The idea is that state-funding makes them less dependent since they do not have to only report what people want to read for ad-revenue but can focus on honest reporting (including reporting critical of the government).

Whether you buy that argument or not is a different discussion. The point is that "state funded" has nothing to do with "state controlled" or even "state affiliated"; just another dumb move by Elon Musk.

I quit Twitter a long time ago. Good riddance, I have not missed anything!

In the BBC interview, Musk says they are thinking about changing the label to "publicly funded".

Seems like a good compromise.

From the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up department, NPR then ran to TikTok. Running home to mama I suppose.

I wish they'd tell me who owns the private media. Labelling the Murdoch press would be useful.

We're talking about it so what Elon is doing is working. Amazing to see all the hate.

national: (adjective)

relating to a nation; common to or characteristic of a whole nation: this policy may have been in the national interest | a national newspaper. • owned, controlled, or financially supported by the federal government: plans for a national art library.

Good. A publicly-funded entity like NPR should be hosting its own Mastodon server anyways.

There's a reason they don't. Much harder to trick people into donating to you if the algorithm on a large private social media site isn't around to prop you up.

Someone is missing a massive opportunity that won't present itself again.

As every big entity and celebrity quits twitter, have an exact clone ready, it almost doesn't matter what the name is.

They don't need to be exclusive on it, just have all those entities cross-post and slowly over the next few years it will build to critical mass.

Any accounts suspected of cross-posting would be banned.

There’s a lot of focus in comments on the funding. But let’s say you are an engineer at Meta. And the next time you log into Twitter, your personal Twitter account has a label that says “Meta-affiliated account.” Would that seem fair or accurate?

Even though you get most of your personal income from your employer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are directing what you do and say on your own social media accounts. Unless you are communicating in some professional capacity on behalf of your employer, like PR.

It’s similar with the concept of “state-affiliated media” (a concept which predates Twitter, by the way). The deciding factor is how much the media operation is doing, essentially, the PR work of the government.

Maybe with Biden in office, some poorly-informed conservatives would be willing to believe NPR is taking direction from the government. But during the Trump presidency? It’s obvious from even a cursory review of NPR content over the years that they are frequently at odds with the contemporaneous administration. Whereas state-affiliated media always is aligned, by definition.

> But let’s say you are an engineer at Meta. And the next time you log into Twitter, your personal Twitter account has a label that says “Meta-affiliated account.” Would that seem fair or accurate?

It seems reasonable to disclose that one works at a company before posting an opinion related to that company online. The statement "I love CeraVe products" is worth a whole lot more from a happy customer than it would be from a CeraVe employee.

But NPR is state-affiliated media. It was founded by the LBJ administration. And has always towed the government line with very little deviation from state-approved positions. Even the calls are heavily screened to not let anything remotely out of the box in.

SpaceX has taken massively more US gov funding than NPR. and many Tesla car buyers were persuaded to make the leap due to US gov tax incentives on EVs

I do miss the old Elon Musk, the one I could respect and appreciate without reservation. feels like something "broke" in his personality a few years ago

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 media reports facts (I assume opinions are their own rights). The only example I saw recently was that NPR blatantly rejected the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden's laptop story. I don't agree with NPR's decision, but I can definitely give them the benefit of doubt that they truly believed that the story was a distraction. So, are there any additional data points that show NPR is a propaganda machine to some extent?

> a propaganda machine would lie or weave facts to paint false pictures

A simple propaganda machine would. A sophisticated propaganda machine wouldn't want to be seen as a propaganda machine and wouldn't go off the rails, but just significantly lean on all topics and reports and massage the truth enough to make an impact, but not so much to derail the train.

No clue whether that's true for NPR, I think I've only ever seen something from them when I randomly discovered Kishi Bashi because he did an NPR concert that I enjoyed. But I don't think it's useful to say "you've either completely left reality whenever it comes to topics concerning your agenda or you're not a propaganda machine". Like, if I have a pair of dices that I can control, I won't just hit the best throw each time, because it won't last. I'll make much more money if I just make sure I win 60% of the time.

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.

He... he really thought that he was buying reality, I guess?

Musk (and Trump) are really, really good at vocally saying things everyone agrees with to cover the fact they're doing the exact opposite. They're populist champions to such a degree that their supporters (and even the media / independents) can't fathom they don't actually care at all.

Free speech, no wars, anti-corruption in DC, etc. These are all things most people agree with. If some of the stuff Trump/Elon did secretly leaked, people would be going crazy. But they've mastered the art of publicly being hypocrites, to the degree that the average person just genuinely can't wrap their heads around.

Like, how can Elon publish "The Twitter Files" and then literally just do way worst stuff with way less accountability, and have people still believe he's a champion for free speech?

It's an intelligence test of sorts. Unfortunately lots of people fail that test.

Maybe the average person just likes one brand of hypocrite over the other brand.

And what sort of secret stuff has Trump or Elon done that hasn't been covered 100x by the media?

Like I said, they don't do secret stuff. People associate shame with having done something bad, and their in-the-open shamelessness is what breaks people's mental models of how to evaluate them.

There's a difference. I have a hard time thinking of anyone (other than Bernie) on the left who has followers in the same way as Trump or Elon. It's a very new (yet not new at all) type of cult of personality.

>If some of the stuff Trump/Elon did secretly leaked, people could be going crazy

Not their supporters, they very, very clearly don't care.

Not sure NPR's track record of this, but other news outlets labelling anything they didn't approve as misinformation, and calling out any affiliations for outlets they don't approve with abandon, now go: "It's not OK when others do it to us".

>The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.

Notice the BS reporting wording, because of course Musk did it, it couldn't be that Twitter employees did the labelling for thousands of outlets, including NPR.

They even managed to write about how Musk "allowed that he might have gotten it wrong" in a negative light.

So, "state-affiliated" is a bad thing, unlike those "by appointment to HM the Queen" that used to grace the advertisements of British (and other) brands?

For a smart man, this guy is a complete idiot.

He's not that smart. He just hires smart people.

LMFAO why it is so hard to accept the truth?

Why doesn't AlJazeera have a label?

Who wouldn’t resent being thrown in the same basket with the likes of Voice of America, Xinhua News Agency and Sputnik under the same label?

“Silicon Valley is full of libertarians”

HN has become so contrarian that it’s now the establishment well rooted in postmodernism and authoritarian tendencies to ensure society agrees with them.

twitter and NPR are both liberal echochambers, although NPR has "high credibility".

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...

re: NPR:liberal bias but not egregious

https://nypost.com/2017/10/21/the-other-half-of-america-that... (I realize NY Post leans way right)

Shameless plug here, but we're building a news feed for news at https://www.forth.news.

It's not a social network. It's a way to follow reporters/news organizations/topics, and see what they post. No misinfo, no spam, no hate speech. Just news.

Opens up a mastodon account: 5k followers after a few months

I think after COVID and all the revelations since then it is pretty clear that funding aside, every big media outlet bends over to their own government when they are being asked to push a certain narrative to the population in order to make us belief or behave in certain ways.

COVID made this extremely blatantly obvious but it was already apparent before COVID. For instance, when the US and its allies wanted to invade Iraq all big media corporations were peddling misinformation and propaganda to get people swayed in favour of an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation over false claims of weapons of mass destruction.

This comment doesn't hold up when you consider the person in charge of running the US government in 2020 was adamantly against any kind of COVID-19 prevention measures.

That person was also a disorganized, ineffective baffoon on a good day with a staff more interested in court intrigues than governing. That massive government institutions operated outside of his will shouldn't be surprising.

You might like "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.

> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

I know it's cliche to say but I started reading this recently and it is amazing how well it applies to the media today. I can't wait for it to be designated a conspiracy theory!

Riiiiight? Imagine reading that at an impressionable age before the Internet was a thing.

To me, most of the craziness we're seeing now seems like a variation on "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?":

> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that soldiers would not want to return to their family farms after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...

...as the masses come out from under the influence of mainstream media. People don't know what to believe and many of them have not had the training and education in rhetoric and logic to be able to effectively navigate the weirdness of the real world.

But he spoke the truth

In the BBC's case, he's acknowledge it's not accurate. NPR's case is similar (and even less "state affiliated" than they are).

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196

> Mr Musk said Twitter was adjusting the label for the BBC to "publicly-funded". "We're trying to be accurate," he said.

If NPR is state affiliated because of 1% government funding, SpaceX should get the tag.

Including Elon's SpaceX spam tweets.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting is entirely government funded, and it funds NPR.

CPB indirectly funds NPR. Direct funding from CPB is ~1%, the rest comes from member dues of local broadcast stations that get their own funding. NPR doesn't control where the member stations get their funding from, and the US Gov't doesn't have editorial control over NPR.

Heck, Twitter itself used to make the distinction between state-funded without editorial control and state-affiliated (where the state has editorial control) on their own Help Center [1].

They removed the distinction on 2023-04-07 [2], two days after it slapped the state-affiliated label on NPR. That distinction had been in place for over two years

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230407155944/https://help.twit...

I’m surprised that NPR is still held with high regards after they just ignored Hunter Biden’s story and justify it with “not really stories”.

Yeah, it's not like their CEO came directly from the relevant government bureau, right?

I'm not a fan of Elon (or most companies, for that matter), but this was the right thing to do. Previously the "government-sponsored" badge was nothing more than US propaganda.

There’s a bit of a “Pluto problem” [1] though with labeling NPR and not explicitly government supported media organizations like Voice of America. This suggests to me that the decision was based on some personal beef the owner has with NPR and not any kind of objective basis.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33462184 (warning: BBC is explicitly supported by the British Government)

Twitter have got the govenrment-funded label on VoA now. But not the BBC, curiously.

> some personal beef the owner has with NPR

NPR is a bogeyman of the American right-wing media, which Musk seems to be consuming an awful lot of in recent years.

The BBBC is funded by TV license fees so their funding is more arms length, also they make money through BBC Worldwide and collaborations with external media companies like HBO. As such they commonly shit on the government of the day, no matter who it is

I don't know how you'd apply measurement using the length of arms and conclude that BBC receives less money than NPR from the government. In any case, editorial influence is a lot more important, and that's where the BBC is falling down lately.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/15/the-gu...

> But not the BBC, curiously

You should check these things before posting. It says "Government-funded Media" right at the top of the page here: https://twitter.com/BBC

I shit you not: it did not an hour ago.

https://archive.ph/VJhTR recorded on 12 Apr 2023 07:43:40 UTC.

...and another hour later it says "Publicly funded media".

Someone is winging it.

It was there yesterday from what I recall. However, there are like 10 variant official accounts of BBC. Only one had the label at first. Similar to how NPR has multiple accounts but only the "main" one had the label. Twitter should be more consistent in labeling all accounts under a company if this is the new policy.

Twitter will be consistent when Elon Musk is no longer its owner.

>It says "Government-funded Media"...

It currently says "Publicly funded media", not "Government-funded Media", and that muddies the waters a bit - publicly-funded doesn't necessarily mean government-funded.

Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not, as the other person who replied to you suggests that changes to these statements appear to be pretty fluid at the moment.

"Publicly funded media" seems like a decent way of characterizing NPR. At some point one might question what Twitter and its users are getting out of all this labeling and relabeling, though. How many users are going to have an I had no idea NPR was publicly funded media but now I know epiphany when encountering that label?

> Not sure if it said "Gov-funded" an hour ago when you commented or not

I am pretty sure all the observations made on labels in this thread were accurate at the moment they were made.

That is Musk's renaming of the "state affiliated" label originally applied to NPR, PBS, and the BBC.

Oh, definitely; it could be based on literally anything, or just effectively random. But it doesn't change my view of whether the outcome is positive or not.

Except, of course, that NPR is not government-sponsored to any meaningful degree.

I wouldn't exactly call the USAGM the "relevant government bureau". Their purpose is to push US-biased news and media outside of the US. I see your point, and it's a bit iffy, but I'd rather judge on actions than reputation.

SpaceX and Telsa are government funded ... More so than NPR. I don't see that tag anywhere on Twitter. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitter is combing the tax code to find government subsidies. It's the slippery slope fallacy. Maybe we should start calling jaywalkers un-convicted criminals. It'd be a good way to differentiate rural and urban people for political gain. This is just another way to keep people heading to twitter for some extra clicks.

Although, NPR was created by an act of Congress, along with the CPB.

and the AP was created by the Supreme Court, the AP is not a government entity.

Every large corporation benefits or has in the past benefited from the government. What difference does it make? Business profiles do marketing and advertising. They're not expected to report neutrally and fairly about current goings-on in society and politics. This is a ridiculous argument that has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

it is very frustrating to see this openly disingenuous argument made repeatedly here in these comments.

media corporations are different from other corporations in that their product is information, as opposed to other types of services or physical goods. information is something that can be biased, politically or otherwise. this does not apply to automobiles, spacecraft, or any other non-information-related product. the release of an electric automobile cannot influence anyone's view, opinion, or emotions, with regards to anything except the existence of said electric automobile.

The mismatch is that it's disingenuous to apply the label in the US, while not applying it to NBC, ABC, Fox, NYT, WaPo, Sinclair, etc. The US has a microkernel government where most actual power resides with corporations, with the same investors and executives owning the major news sources and shaping their coverage. Ironically, "government funded" NPR and PBS are in many ways actually more independent of the governing power structure. There's a similar blindspot where US culture readily condemns foreign governments with singular dominant parties, while letting our own two party oligopoly (in alignment on most policies) go essentially uncritiqued.

(full disclosure: I'm unable to listen to NPR without falling asleep. That's not meant to be some sort of knock, rather it's just what happens)

> The US has a microkernel government

Brilliant insight. Thank you.

Interestingly, VOA, RFA etc. are not labeled state-affiliated media.

Edit: Actually VOA does have it now; I swear I checked just two days ago... Their various foreign language accounts still aren’t labeled though.

VOA is also labelled as "government funded", which implies less editorial control but personally sounds worse than affliated. The labelling is all over place.

they should add a "government-sponsored" badge to the spacex twitter account. and maybe even starlink and telsa (assuming they have government subsidies or their consumers are using tax credits to buy EV or rural internet)

Would be slick if all the space-company accounts had a couple lines of detail identifying what % of their total sales comes from government, military, commercial customers, etc.

Of course this would require people wanting to move away from “how can I tarnish this account with a label?” and toward “how can I improve transparency without aiming to insult?”

As others have noted already, their actions don't match their own rules so this is, again, just Musk being an angry manbaby.

He curiously missed Al Jazeera, RFE/RL, and the dozens of media organizations that the NED subsidizes. I don't think there's a conspiracy or anything, I just think he has a grudge against a handful of media companies.

They likely just haven't gotten around to all of them yet.

It's always a bit strange when someone says they're not a fan of Elon and then proceed to give him an absurd level of benefit of the doubt by just eliding all the obvious facts that what he's doing is ridiculous and bad.

Government-sponsored was not a US propaganda badge, it was a response to a serious concern about adversarial governments influencing US debate through 3rd party cut outs. It's a difficult problem to solve but the previous employees made a good faith effort to come up with a definition and then enforce it. Musk, however, didn't do that. He took an official label with a definition that Twitter publicly discloses and applied it to a news organization he personally doesn't like despite it being completely inaccurate.

If what you're arguing, is that the label was bad, and badly or unevenly enforced what Musk has done is made it worse - not better. There's now no consistent definition, all the old organisations that were tagged are still tagged, and he's driven a bus through twitter's credibility.

Even if you accept that there was a genuine problem with the way the previous system was designed, there's simply no way to argue that Musk has improved it. And to be clear - the previous system was exactly what Musk claimed he wanted for twitter - a clear open definition you could point to, and labelling accounts rather than banning them in order to maximize free speech, if this system weren't in place before it is almost certain Musk would've loved it if a right wing bigot twitter user suggested it.

What you actually seem to be arguing is "Something should have been done, this was a thing, therefore this was the right thing to do".

>Government-sponsored was not a US propaganda badge, it was a response to a serious concern about adversarial governments

For most people USA is an adversarial government. You've just confirmed it was a propaganda badge meaning "unamerican".

Well, Bye.

NPR has been insane since Trump/2016. I play a game with a few friends/family, we tune into NPR, and see how fast they'll talk about trans issue or white supremacy ... its literally 90% of the time within 60 seconds

I play that too! I call it NPR bingo

well done. losing NPR clearly is giving Musk pause.

By "clearly giving him pause" you mean he finally went to bed after spending the evening joking about BBC?

(At this moment the last tweet is 8 hours ago after several tweets about BBC including dick "jokes")

So, that "pause" now is, quote, "Publicly funded PBS joins publicly funded NPR in leaving Twitter in a huff after being labeled “Publicly Funded” " https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646359636361224193

Don't they know when they're being trolled?

? At the same time they removed the state-affiliated media, from a ton of global times and CCT affiliated content creators. Guess musk really needs that tesla market in china..

Do you have references? I’m surprised I haven’t heard this previously.

> they removed the state-affiliated media, from a ton of global times and CCT affiliated content creators

Source? Global Times’ Twitter accounts appears properly labelled [1].

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/globaltimesnews

Why "falsely"? I've been an NPR fan my whole life, but there is no denying at all that their coverage of american politics is nowhere near impartial. So as long as current party in power is aligned with them, they are de-factor state-aligned.

I think "falsely" because they're primarily viewer supported and less than 1% of their budget comes from the government. So it's odd for them to get the label when other news outlets like BBC and Voice of America (which is literally a state owned propaganda outlet) don't

Because it's not state-affiliated or state-sponsored media. Saying it is is factually incorrect.

Whether or not it's impartial is a completely different conversation.

Why "falsely"?

Because "nowhere near impartial" != "state-affiliated". And your attempt to tie the two is a bit lacking.

It has the words National and Public right in its name. I'd bet many already assume NPR is somehow state related.

On a different note it's last news post on its main account had almost a million views. That is a lot of eyeballs to give up, but they don't really have advertisers to please.

> By David Folkenflik

According to Wikipedia...

> David Folkenflik ... is an American reporter based in New York City and serving as media correspondent for National Public Radio.

Interesting conflict of interest in news reporting.

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.

> But in the real world this happens with some regularity and editorial boards have set ways of dealing with this sort of situation

Conflicts of interest are things to know and look out for.

This is not the case of an editorial board. And, when publications write about themselves, even when there are editorial boards, there is a conflict and they may very well report the story differently than a 3rd party.

Not realizing the conflict of interest is akin to being just fine with content on a news site about a product written by someone at the product company with no label of sponsored content or something similar.

> they may very well report the story differently than a 3rd party

They may well do so, but that needs samples and analysis, not blanket statements.

Unless you have a particular beef with this article I do not think that is a strong argument to make.

Terms sound acceptable to me. They're constantly decrying how it's full of hate speech due to Elon anyway. Time to take a stance against "hate-speech" right?

Just fyi, simultaneously saying your funds from the government are minuscule while also saying you shouldn't have them cut is just a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. Also, that in fact means you're state-affiliated and funded.

They were labeled as "state-affiliated media" and after a retraction, Twitter referred to them as "government-funded"

On March 20th, NPR listed this retraction on their website "An earlier version of this story mistakenly said Musk bought Twitter for $44 million. In fact, he paid $44 billion." [1]

Twitter can't make mistakes, but NPR makes dozens of them daily. Should we rage quit NPR everytime they issue a retraction to preserve our own independence and integrity?

[1] https://www.npr.org/corrections/

It wasn't a mistake, it was intentional. Musk verified this, and even if we disregard his ramblings, they intentionally removed NPR as an example of who wouldn't be marked as state-affiliated from their description of how the label is applied, which gives the game away.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

It sure doesn't seem like a mistake. Twitter itself used to make the distinction between state-funded (without editorial control) and state-affiliated (where the state has editorial control) on their own Help Center [1].

They removed the distinction on 2023-04-07 [2], two days after they slapped the state-affiliated label on NPR. That timeline sure doesn't sound like Musk made a mistake and sought to correct it, but more like he swung his whiny authority around and then people had to scramble to retract/alter policies to fit with Musk's world view.

If it was a mistake, Twitter would have owned up to it instead of altering their policies to match the mistake.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https:/help.twitt...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230407155944/https://help.twit...

If NPR is really concerned about getting balanced news to the masses, then their decision to quit twitter, in the lack of an alternative and equivalent platform, seems short-sighted and more like a temper tantrum of a kindergartner, than that of a thoughtful and mature news organization.

It also reinforces the conspiracy theories that they were never truly independent. By making a stinker about this issue, they are trying to paint Musk as the evil overlord hell bent on strangling anyone he dislikes. NYT, WaPo and other leftist media outlets are going to join (yet again) this bandwagon, guaranteed.

Did BBC quit? No.

NPR, grow up, be an adult.

I'm one of the people who thinks "government-funded" is a fair label (though "state-affiliated" isn't as it implies editorial control).

However, not putting up with someone's (or a company's) antics is not a temper-tantrum, nor a factor in if their decision was "adult" or not. If an organization is offended by a company's decision, then what's wrong with their decision to leave?

Why would they tarnish their brand by having all of their posts accompanied by a label that they deem to be false?

While I don't have proof, I believe the screaming of NPR about this issue was deliberate (yet again) attempt at painting Musk as the "Evil Overlord" about to destroy the very fabric of fairness, democracy and society.

And I never implied NPR cannot or should not leave if they disagree. The BBC example was simply drawing parallels with someone who made no stink about this and chose to stay. To my knowledge, there was no attempt from NPR to have that label corrected, which seems to be the first logical step.

Off topic, I never found NPR to be neutral or unbiased. They are great pretenders of neutrality though.

Whilst I admit that Musk is needlessly erratic, unpredictable and troll-like in these matters, part of me enjoys the pushback against legacy media on Twitter.

They've come into power by riding the Twitter hate train, maximally exploiting the algorithm that rewards rage and division. Lowering standards for journalism to a mere shadow of its former self. And yet they always have clean hands and are perfectly neutral, according to themselves.

Regardless of where you stand on this, it's interesting to watch. Journalists don't really have anywhere else to go. Their status and reach is exclusive to Twitter and cannot easily be replicated elsewhere.

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