Pretty clearly disingenuous on Twitter's part. Whether you agree with content on NPR or not, it doesn't change depending who is in power. It would have been nonsensical to apply this label during the last administration.
If NPR has such a problem being labeled a state-affiliated organization and they really aren't under the influence of the state or depend on state funds, then why not simply cut ties and become a private company?
If NPR isn't really under the influence of MyPillow or depend on MyPillow funds, then why not simply cut ties?
(Fox News gets about the same percentage of revenue from MyPillow and Balance of Nature as NPR does from grants)
My joke here is way to seriously say that if simply receiving money from a source is enough to indict an organization, then we have a lot of work to do beyond NPR to be suspicious of everyone. But if the requirement is what it has traditionally been, showing actual evidence of influence or coercion, then to me that sounds like a more sensible way to do things.
The label was created for organizations that are controlled or coerced by their governments so people could take what they say knowing it had potentially been crafted by that government.
I don't think there would be anything wrong with a transparent listing of all funding sourced for every news organization, but this is something different from that.
> The label was created for organizations that are controlled or coerced by their governments so people could take what they say knowing it had potentially been crafted by that government.
how exactly do you think that sort of stuff happens in other countries?
If NPR was controlled and coerced by the United States government, wouldn't there be at least some observable difference in content depending on who was controlling the United States government at any given time?
There would, if not for the fact that who controls the US government doesn't really change. The president doesn't call the shots, the special interest groups, department heads and intelligence agencies do, and those are the same groups that are able to exercise direct control over NPR. Frankly this isn't much more subtle than your average show-democracy.
To give two concrete examples of this you can look into the 7th Floor Group and Operation Mockingbird.
Anyone with any political opinions at all is ideologically aligned in that sense, making them ideologically affiliated with anyone sharing that alignment.
NPR, as it happens, has run many stories that seemed aligned with the right or the left, depending on the subject. They're generally pro-military and pro-wealth, while being against racism and censorship, so it's not as if they're either all left-wing or all right-wing.
Someone else mentioned this, but there are a couple million government employees, a change in Administration doesn't really impact that in any meaningful way because the federal government is absolutely massive. NPR does have a bias towards the US-centric neoliberal order, regardless of which party is in power. In that sense, it is at least partially funded by government and parroting pro-US government messaging.
It's nowhere on the level of some countries but it's not exactly an independent media outlet and we shouldn't pretend it is.
> Whether you agree with content on NPR or not, it doesn't change depending who is in power.
Well first, we don’t exactly have wholesale government purges at the federal level. Second, how is it inaccurate to say NPR is affiliated with the government? It is.
Methinks the real reason behind the outrage is because the original use of the “state affiliated” label on Twitter was to give a subtle “watch out, these guys are probably spewing propaganda!” warning. Much the same way that the blue checkmarks are ostensibly “we’ve verified that this person is who they say they are” but over time it morphed into a “stamp of approval” for the person.
Unless we're listing out all the sources of funding the various media organizations have, what would be the new use of this label if not to say "watch out"?
The use should have always been to simply note which sources are affiliated in some way with a state government, not to be a subtle attack on sources that Twitter doesn’t like. Affiliation doesn’t mean “controlled by”, it means there is a link between the two. NPR takes some amount of taxpayer money. Like it or not, they are affiliated with the US government. Same with the BBC and the UK.
This wouldn’t have even been a big deal if Twitter had originally been direct with labeling, instead of trying to hide double meaning within labels that can act as dogwhistles.
Should Twitter as it stands today, apply the label more universally? Sure. But the fact that it didn’t in the past ties back to the original point, that Twitter wanted to label certain outlets as being propaganda mouthpieces while at the same time being able to hide behind “hey, we didn’t say _propaganda_, we just said _state affiliated!_”
> Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor. State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, will not be labeled.
Like "fact checking", it's to discredit sources that their editorial staff disagrees with while promoting the sources that they do agree with. You don't have to entertain arguments with sources you disagree with if you've preemptively stated that they're untrustworthy.
You know probably no one understands the purpose of the label.
The reporting about the purpose of the label from yesterday where the reporter actually talked to the former executives involved with setting it up before they quit Twitter, was pretty clear. The tweet content was influenced by state.
Now the purpose of the label is meaningless. It's arbitrary. If Elon Musk can be convinced to change it for an NPR by an arbitrary reporter, as he apparently is being today, that NPR should not be labeled in the way that it is, then the significance of the label is thoroughly suspect.
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.
Yesterday that same page was different, Not mentioning NPR as an exclusion.
And days before It was apparently like how it is now, mentioning how NPR is excluded.
So, Twitter is changing its policies frantically.
And the whole point of this fiasco is that truth that you point out of state influence versus state funding. Twitter is fiddling with its own policies incorrectly.
that's because they're an American organization which is a public broadcast service. That label says nothing about their affiliation or their relationship to the state in terms of publishing propaganda.
> 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.
If NPR is so concerned about being called stated-affiliated, and if their government funding is really <1% of their revenue, then they should just say "no thank you" to anymore government money.
1) the affiliate stations that broadcast in each market are very often government funded up to 100%. They pay NPR fees to broadcast their content and be the local “NPR station”. It’s essentially laundering government funds if they want to say they only receive 1%.
2) They are a non-profit. Most of their funding comes from donations. These are tax deductible donations meaning tax payers are indirectly funding them.
They make money otherwise too. But without the donations (which would not happen if they were not a non-profit) and without the government subsidized local stations, they’d not exist.
NPR is state affiliated media.
That doesn’t mean it is state directed propaganda. There is an asymmetry with organizations like NPR vs. say RT however.
NPR exists in a country that largely respects the rule of law and has disclosure requirements, accountability to the public and congress. None of that exists with RT.
If twitter is going to have these labels it should differentiate authoritarian propaganda.
It's not like NPR shies away from calling out the US government for bad behavior, a lot of their coverage is very critical. It is completely editorially independent.
I’m not saying they are bad journalists. But they are deeply tied to the state.
About 1/3 of their funding is from member station dues. Their member stations receive most of their funding via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the board of which is appointed by the President (of the United States, not the CPB). CPB gets its money from congress.
> Their member stations receive most of their funding via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Most funding - no. Member stations do get a decent chunk of money from CPB, but not a majority. The majority comes from corporate (and private) sponsorships. Much like NPR as a whole.
“Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors and annual grants from the publicly-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
“Although NPR receives only 1% of its direct funding from the federal government,[5] member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from the federal (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and state governments.”
“NPR states it is not state-run media, and further states it operates independently of the U.S. government;[5] nonetheless, NPR indicates that federal funding is essential to NPR and that the loss of federal funding would weaken the network.”
The levels separating direct government funding from NPR pile up. They get membership dues from radio stations that receive public money I mean, all money comes from the Federal Reserve. Are we all state affiliated or do the levels it passes through to get to us make us independent? Is SpaceX state affiliated because of the money it gets from government contracts?
SpaceX is obviously state affiliated. They provide military and intelligence services to the U.S. government. They receive huge contracts from various state agencies.
Revenue streams matter because they have the ability to influence. Why is this controversial?
NPR's immediate claim that only 1% of their money comes from federal funds is a bald-faced lie. It's completely contrary to the claims they've made on a regular basis, that are present right this second on their own website.
Search for "Public Radio Station Revenues (FY20)" and you can plainly see a graph that states that 8% of their money comes from "Federal appropriation via CPB" and then another 5% comes from a combination of Federal, state, and local government sources.
The minute they get slapped with a state funded label they pretend that they only get 1% of their money from the government, in contrast to their reported finances for the past several decades. It is weasel word behavior to pretend that 8% of entirely federally sourced funds is irrelevant because it is passed through the CPB first (which is itself a state media agency, created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967)
"[NPR] differs from other non-profit membership media organizations such as the Associated Press, in that it was established by an act of Congress.[4] Although NPR receives only 1% of its direct funding from the federal government,[5] member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from the federal (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and state governments.[6][7][8][9][10][11] NPR states it is not state-run media, and further states it operates independently of the U.S. government;[5] nonetheless, NPR indicates that federal funding is essential to NPR and that the loss of federal funding would weaken the network."[1]
So I could see an argument going both ways, technically it isn't owned and operated by the US Government, but it requires US Government funding to continue to exist and was established by an act of congress.
More of Twitter is funded by Saudi Arabia than NPR is by the federal government, should Twitter also have a state-affiliated label?
The stated purpose of the label was to identify state-operated news (ie, literal government propaganda outlets). NPR is very obviously not that, and it along with the BBC were literally Twitter's two examples of things that won't get the label.
Only if you're being disingenuous; this very much is not what is meant by "state-affiliated", since the state doesn't have any editorial control over NPR.
I'm not sure I see your point. The label is 'government affiliated' not 'government owned' or 'government operated'.
The argument for the label seems very clear. What would the argument against be?
Edit: I was mistaken: Twitter originally drew a line between state funded and state editorial control. From Twitter's blog in 2020, "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, will not be labeled."
Two things. First Twitter's own policy clearly states "state affiliated media" are media corporations where the state influences editorial decisions. There's no evidence the US government has any editorial influence on NPR, and that's what is (supposedly) required. Just because NPR receives a little federal funding directly, and some federal funding indirectly, isn't proof of editorial control or even influence by the state.
Second, the BBC, which is primarily funded by the UK government, and whose applicants for top positions must be vetted by MI5, doesn't have a state affiliated media warning. So clearly funding source isn't actually a concern, unless it's NPR.
>It differs from other non-profit membership media organizations such as the Associated Press, in that it was established by an act of Congress.[4] Although NPR receives only 1% of its direct funding from the federal government,[5] member stations (which pay dues amounting to approximately one third of NPR's revenue), tend to receive far larger portions of their budgets from the federal (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and state governments.[6][7][8][9][10][11] NPR states it is not state-run media, and further states it operates independently of the U.S. government;[5] nonetheless, NPR indicates that federal funding is essential to NPR and that the loss of federal funding would weaken the network.[6] The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which created NPR in 1970, and still funds NPR, operates through 47 U.S.C. 396.[12][13]
The intent of this label was to highlight government propaganda outlets and distinguish them from news organizations. NPR is editorially independent and should not have this label.
Honestly at this point in my life I don’t believe anybody can be editorially independent of their funding source no matter how hard they try. A label indicating accounts who receive government money despite what they claim about editorial independence seems like the move. Otherwise all the “propaganda outlets” will just claim independence. If the BBC is heavily subsidized then label it.
Sure, you can't be truly editorially independent, but I'd say any fair evaluation of NPR's coverage would show that it is not a state mouthpiece, like Voice of America. It's an establishment mouthpiece (the state and the establishment aren't completely overlapping).
This is America: you can bite the hand that feeds you and still be fed.
> The intent of this label was to highlight government propaganda outlets and distinguish them from news organizations.
Then Twitter should have, from the beginning, attached a big “propaganda warning” label on such sources instead of trying to make passive insinuations to the same effect using a label that has broad meaning. Looks like that backfired.
State-affiliated does seem to imply far more state involvement than this, though? And... just checking, but I don't see this same thing on BBC accounts. Such that I'm now curious how you would distinguish those?
Even more amusing "NPR Health News" doesn't have this. So, am I just to believe that Twitter is incompetent?
Even those affiliate stations only receive a minority of their funding from federal, state, and local governments. Most of their money comes from corporate sponsorships and listener contributions.
It's a biased labeling. Terminology is being abused here. Read the specific Twitter policy not Wikipedia.
Twitter is applying a label they themselves are defining. Twitter is selectively labeling because while also not knowing the finances of every entity in existence.
Also the actual Twitter policy, the way they've defined it, says that beyond taking funding, and an entity also must toe the line of the state. Which NPR does not.
So, it's inaccurate and therefore misinformation. Worse it's biased so it could be disinformation.
From NPRs own article on the topic (which the submitted article seems to mostly paraphrase):
> Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the platform's recent labeling of NPR as "state-affiliated media" might not have been accurate during a series of email exchanges that provided a glimpse into the billionaire's thought process on decisions that reverberate far beyond the social network.
> Regardless, as of late Thursday, the designation remained.
Oh, and: "When reporters reach out for official comment from the company on news stories, Twitter's communications department replies with a poop emoji." Classy.
Recently on Twitter I saw a doctored video of Joe Biden saying something about going after Trump. Twitter really needs to clean up the mess. There’s way too much noise. People need to get some sort of reduced rating for promoting false news.
Look, NPR isn't state affiliated because it also gets lots of money from various foundations and corporations which are themselves built using massive amounts of state funding. If you add those extra steps it's totally different!
Sarcasm aside, NPR has been a reliable mouthpiece for what we might call "establishment state" narratives on subjects like Ukraine, "the pandemic," bank bailouts, and on and on, even up to the blatant US-sponsored coup attempt in Bolivia. Bringing on some token conservative commentator from the Hoover Institute or NYT Opinion pages to occasionally add some conservative take on social issues or even-more-right-wing-than-the-usual-neoliberals economic take doesn't really change that picture.
It would have been pure silliness to accuse NPR of being a "state channel" when Trump was president now wouldn't it?
NPR is not "state affiliated", it is ideologically affiliated. In this it closely resembles many other public broadcasters, e.g. SR (Sveriges Radio, the Swedish equivalent to NPR) and SVT (Sveriges Television, the equivalent to PBS), NOS (Nederlandse Omrpoep Stichting, the Dutch public broadcaster), etc. Depending on the ideological colour of the current government these broadcasters either act as megaphones for the government or as channels for the opposition.
1) How is it a threat to free speech to give some helpful labels or context to Tweets? Pretty much all controversial social media topics get some kind of disclaimers, "fact-checking" or labels from sites like YouTube, Twitter, and others.
2) If NPR receives government funding, isn't calling them state affiliated at least in the ballpark of reasonable labels?
3) Personally, I think the labels themselves should probably change. Rather than calling media entities state-affiliated, maybe Twitter could link to whatever public data is available about each media outlet's funding source. Rather than seeing "state affiliated", maybe people should see the percentage of funding a media outlet gets from government sources. If NPR gets ~4% of their funding from government sources, maybe adding that figure in as the label is fine. If RussiaToday gets X% of their funding from the Russian government, knowing that is helpful to assess their posts too.
The intent of the label was to highlight government propaganda editorial outlets so that consumers understand the source of the information.
Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. While it highlights an interesting factoid, funding does not necessarily correlate to editorial control. That information also isn't reliably available for all state broadcasters. And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.
> Funding seems like a problematic metric for this.
I'm not seeing that. Funding is as close to an objective measurement of control as you could ever come up with.
A media entity can of course be biased towards a government, whether or not they get anywhere from 0 to 100% of their funding from the government, but the likelihood of government bias almost certainly increases with more funding.
If you see 99% of media outlets with < 1% of government funding, but then there's a few outlets with a large percentage of government funding, that's important information for weighing their journalism.
> And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.
Honestly, I think this is a jaw-droppingly phenomenal idea. Everybody is a political actor on Twitter, and I'm sure SpaceX and other corporations make tweets that are directly or indirectly weighing in on political and other issues that are relevant to them. Knowing that they have a dog in a particular fight is really important for weighing their tweets fairly.
I had a list with a bunch of Twitters in support of Ukraine, including NAFO which those who support Russia find problematic. One day recently I went to my lists to find it gone. My other three lists were still there.
I just saw this: Elon Musk's new Twitter: a "verified" account that was previously suspended for spreading disinformation about the Bucha Massacre now spreading completely fictional quotes from Volodymyr Zelenskyy with over a thousand retweets and nearly 300,000 views.
Elon Musk has been gaslighting as an "enlightened centrist" who happens to have rightwing views for years, I knew from the day he bought Twitter that his goal was to control digital media for the right.
At least he's out about it now. Dave Troy wrote an interesting article about it
Musk’s Twitter Buy Makes No Sense – Unless It’s Part of Something Bigger. Brexit and Trump were initially seen as jokes, but the new owner of the social media giant could pose a serious threat to democracy – and a boon for Vladimir Putin
His views only partly align with conservatism and Republicanism (note that Peter Thiel identifies as a republican but is gay). There is a subset of the Republican party that thinks climate change is real and that we should prepare for it, not deny it, and sees sustainable energy as a desirable goal.
It's hard to understand Elon's politics without considering libertarianism, singularitism, technocracy, demagoguery, and populism.
He also publicly endorsed Putin's plan for Ukraine and prevented the Ukrainian government from using SpaceX hardware near the front line. Edit also he only doesn't launch Russian and Chinese gear because he knows the Federal Government would seize SpaceX. They would come in hard and force him to divest all ownership.
That is completely false, SpaceX fronted internet service for the entirety of Ukraine for the duration of the war up until recently.
The only restriction was not using the actual dishes on drones or other weaponry, thus that the SpaceX constellations wouldn’t be considered a target for Russia.
They aren't state funded. They get most of their money from corporate sponsorship. They get some money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the majority is from private sponsors. The public money they get is indirect so the layers of separation makes it hard to put them in the same category as BBC or Russian or State Media. They are so dependent on private sector sponsorship that they are laying people off now.
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.
CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.
CPB is the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting and the largest single source of funding for public radio, television, and related online and mobile services.
CPB’s mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services. It does so by distributing more than 70% of its funding to more than 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations.
CPB by the numbers:
391 radio grantees, representing 1,207 public radio stations
158 television grantees, representing 357 public TV stations
251 of the total 549 radio and TV grantees are considered rural
99% of Americans have access to public media
More than 70% of CPB’s federal funding goes directly to local public media stations
Less than 5% of funding is spent on CPB operations
CPB does not produce programming and does not own, operate or control any public broadcasting stations. Additionally, CPB, PBS, and NPR are independent of each other and of local public television and radio stations.
CPB strives to support diverse programs and services that inform, educate, enlighten and enrich the public. Through grants, CPB encourages the development of content that addresses the needs of underserved audiences, especially children and minorities. CPB also funds multiple digital platforms used by thousands of public media producers and production companies throughout the country.
CPB's core values of collaboration, innovation, engagement, and diversity, help to inform our program investments system-wide.
So you'd be fine with labeling Tesla a state-affiliated organization? I suppose that's at least consistent, though I don't see the utility of a label that applies so broadly.
Note that state contributions totaled less than 5% of their total revenue. The CPB grant, which could be stretched to be considered state/government contributions, was about 16% of their revenue.
Given that member station contribution is 30% of NPR's total revenue, there's no chance that state funding is going to reach 30%-40% values.
And those member stations rely on _local_ subscriptions to stay solvent. They need to engage with their communities in a way that the communities find useful.
This basically is big govt working the right way. This framework enables local communities to support their local public broadcasting networks, which then contribute to the state and federal news via NPR, which is better at elevating the stories that matter to the nation.
> “Well, then we should fix it,” Musk wrote in an email to tech reporter Bobby Allyn, who had pointed out government aid accounts for roughly 1% of NPR’s finances.
Only in a sense which removes all the usefulness of the phrase. If you're going to have the label at all, don't put it on NPR; if you're going to put it on NPR, better to just not have it.
I do and I don't think that I agree with your conclusion. Everybody was reporting that the war was going to be justified based on this shocking evidence which turned out to be false, thank you Collin Powell.
I am genuinely confused why stuff like this is such a big deal. Whatever happened to "twitter is a private company" and "twitter isn't the public square" and "if you don't like it just make your own twitter"? Why is twitter so important now? Why does everyone care so much about the blue checks now?
>I am genuinely confused why stuff like this is such a big deal. Whatever happened to "twitter is a private company" and "twitter isn't the public square" and "if you don't like it just make your own twitter"?
That argument was being made to people who were opposed to the right of private platforms to moderate content, and who wanted the government to force them to act like a "public square" (using a false definition of the public square that assumes such spaces cannot be regulated) and make it illegal for them to present content using an algorithmic feed or to moderate any content beyond strict illegality.
No one complaining about what Musk is doing here is also insisting that the government redefine the fundamental nature of freedom of speech and force him to do so under threat of violence. So the dichotomy you're presenting here doesn't apply. Everyone understands that Musk has the right to do what he's doing, they just disagree with him doing it.
Bc despite Twitter devolving into a completely unusable product, it’s still massively influential. If we let this slide — which we keep doing with just about every change since last summer — the slippery slope turns into a waterslide.
Idk, it seems to me that if less people took twitter seriously we’d all be better off. If NPR stops tweeting, great! Hopefully all the other journalists leave too.
People seem to forget that when twitter first started it became famous because charlie sheen was smoking crack and tweeting about it. I say we go back to that and stop pretending it’s anything more.
They're not state affiliated, they're just 1% funded by the federal government, their child programs are sponsored by PDX which is funded by other federal programs, a series of shadowy foundations (macarthur etc) who are basically storage facilities for out of work government insiders, who all seem to march in lock step to whatever the US elites are thinking. Yeah. it's propaganda. Let's split hairs though
