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Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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