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."
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
This is true, but Elon Musk is, let's say, a producer of content that drives engagement on the platform that is Twitter. I'd say he gets enough tax breaks and such to qualify for a state shill label. That's not even considering his many years' long business affiliation with the Saudis, even before he decided to piss away 44 billion dollars to buy one of the world's largest megaphones.
Twitter is a media company, a publisher with an editorial voice that we have to assume is independent from the Saudi government or any government funding the owner's other businesses.
more ontopic, I think its indicative of a general exodus of brands in general as well. nobody wants to pay for the checkmark, nobody wants to have their brand identity or message challenged or negated by fly-by-night impostors, and most people have lost tolerance for the abdication of moderation and safe space for a modern brand in general. The time to close your account was arguably last November when leadership fired all the employees and locked themselves out of the headquarters.
thats not to say theyre evacuating to another platform, just that 'no platform' is a safer option than twitter platform.
Yeah, agreed. I was one of the people who quit Twitter in November. It has been a real loss for me, going from 7k followers on Twitter to 0.1k on Mastodon. Especially now that I'll be soon starting a job hunt, I miss that. But when I review my reasons for leaving Twitter [1], I'm not regretting it. I would rather have no platform than that platform. And the calculation for brands is surely much more fraught. I expect NPR will be the beginning of a fair bit of large orgs quitting Twitter, either loudly or just tailing off.
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 :)
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.
The labels are for media publishers. They are to make readers aware of the motivations of the writers. This was Twitter practice long before Musk. He just removed the bias toward not labeling US media companies.
Why would SpaceX need a label? “Warning: this rocket fuel is affiliated with the US government so maybe don’t trust it’s opinion on open flames”
An org that primarily sells media (PBS or Twitter) should live by what its primary revenue source is for that media, because it colors the media that goes out the door.
Further, are the bulk of twitter's profits derived from concessions on a lease ? I don't think so, but I'm open minded.
An org that does not sell media, but physical goods (i.e. Tesla) is arguably selling cars, not media.
I'd say its more like serious politics games. Yes, anyone who is interested in material reality knows that all media institutions are controlled by wealthy people, governments, and so on. No, that doesn't mean there isn't real benefit to some groups in projecting the illusion of their independence while simultaneously sewing doubt about the independence of other media. Material reality is a fringe idea pursued by a small minority (and shrinking all the time).
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
> 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]
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."
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'
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.
Readit News
"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...
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
Dead Comment
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)_/¯
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
> 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.
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)
Deleted Comment
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.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-hol...
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...
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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?
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.
Your (and Elons) argument has shades of the famous ‘with us or against us’ line. Details matter.
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?
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.
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.
http://wondermark.com/1k62/
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.
thats not to say theyre evacuating to another platform, just that 'no platform' is a safer option than twitter platform.
[1] https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
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.
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 :)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Are they a "media" company primarily dedicated to the practice of journalism?
I think the "state affiliated media" could be applied to Twitter by the same standards, but for Tesla & SpaceX, just "state affiliated"
as for whether it's a media company, that's irrelevant and seems to be an attempt to move the goalposts
Dead Comment
Why would SpaceX need a label? “Warning: this rocket fuel is affiliated with the US government so maybe don’t trust it’s opinion on open flames”
An org that primarily sells media (PBS or Twitter) should live by what its primary revenue source is for that media, because it colors the media that goes out the door.
Further, are the bulk of twitter's profits derived from concessions on a lease ? I don't think so, but I'm open minded.
An org that does not sell media, but physical goods (i.e. Tesla) is arguably selling cars, not media.
Are SpaceX or Tesla news organizations?
Deleted Comment
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.
They aren't trying to hide it.
The NASA contracts are very much public.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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...
Mastodon blew its moment. It could have eaten Twitter’s lunch. But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.
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
I do agree that migrating between servers could be a more streamlined process though.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
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"
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.
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+?
I wouldn't envy the hosts having to read our their addresses but npr.org could absolutely implement WebFinger if they were thus inclined
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.
Deleted Comment
Nah.
Why do they keep saying they receive almost nothing, yet at the same time say government funding is essential to their operation?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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%.
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.
Hope that helps you visualize the situation.
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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Congressional appropriation > Corporation for Public Broadcasting > grants for local affiliates > fee paid to NPR
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...
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.
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?
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.
https://www.wbur.org/about
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
> 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-...
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
Dead Comment
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."
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'
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.