A well-written summary of how Musk has ruined Twitter, including this excellent opener:
About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favorite neighborhood bar. Then he fired veteran bouncers and bartenders, tried to stiff the landlord and at least one vendor, and demanded that regulars pay a cover charge. He’s frequentlystruggled to serve his customers, yet he’s penalized them for mentioning the competition. He’s tamped down the revelry in general, really — a lot of conversation at his watering hole has been drowned out by Musk’s own never-ending stage act, which consists mainly of him yelling dad jokes at customers through a bullhorn.
He argues that Twitter has lost/is losing its cultural relevance/centrality (to which I can only say: hooray!).
More than that, Twitter under Musk appears to have lost the thing that made it impossible to quit: Its centrality. The site was once the most consequential place online, not just a disseminator of breaking news and commentary, but something like an arbiter. At its cultural peak, from about 2015 to perhaps 2020, what people talked about on Twitter seemed to set the agenda for discussions elsewhere. Even last year, it still mattered: After years of mismanagement and glacial innovation, Twitter, on the eve of Musk’s reign, was still the one place to visit when anything big happened anywhere.
Whatever Twitter is now, it is no longer that venue. Cultural relevance is difficult to quantify, but you know it when you feel it. And now, when something’s going down, Twitter rarely feels like the place where everyone is gathering to watch.
I noticed this when Donald Trump was arraigned. Trump, the most powerful tweeter the world has ever known, a man whose every typo could send Twitter into paroxysms of easy dunks, appeared in court and Twitter was, as Vox’s Shirin Ghaffary put it, “a snoozefest.”
Nitpick: To be fair, just on the basis of demographics one would expect most countries with smaller populations (like Norway with <6 million people and Switzerland with <9 million) to spend more per capita on public broadcasting than the US with >330 million people. One broadcast can reach a hundred million people as well as a hundred thousand, and both Norway and the US have only 24 hours in a day to broadcast in, so the same amount and quality of broadcasting is inevitably going to be cheaper per capita for Americans than Norwegians.
That said, it must be admitted that the correlation between population size and per capita spending in your graph varies wildly, so clearly there are important factors other than basic demographics in play here.
NPR has individual stations that are more or less independent. There are some requirements for flying the NPR banner, but most programming decisions are made and paid for at the local level.
A single broadcast is generally only going to reach a couple million at most.
From what they have said in their fund drives, most of that federal money actually goes to stations that are in areas that are too sparse to support an NPR station. So cutting funding wouldn’t affect most of NPR’s operations, but it would reduce their reach into rural communities.
I caught some highlights of Elon’s interview on the BBC, and boy, what a missed opportunity for the BBC. A mix of softball questions followed by embarrassingly fumbling anything approaching a tough question.
It’s a valid point, but does it account for why Norway and Switzerland spend $180 and $164 per capita and the US spends $3? Does it account for why, in the US alone AFAIK, public broadcasting has to go begging to viewers and corporations, figuratively standing on the corner like a hobo with hat in hand trying to collect spare change? Even in Canada, with an embarrassingly low $33 per capita, CBC Television and CBC Radio (and the website) are self-sufficient. CBC Television admittedly went to a commercial model to stay viable because of high production costs, but CBC Radio remains high quality and commercial-free, and never has to beg for donations.
The relevant point, at any rate, is that Elmo is delusional because PBS and NPR get proportionately very little money from the government. And contrary to the claims of conservative lunatics both in the US and in Canada, the government has exactly zero influence over any purported ideology of public broadcasters. The reality is that conservative lunatics like Elmo and Trump hate them because they tell the unvarnished truth.
These days “hard-hitting” is not something to expect from anyone at the Beeb when dealing with anyone likely to hit back. The chill has been on for a while.
I agree! I don’t doubt Elon’s narcissism makes it impossible to ignore anything written about him, so any time spent writing about what an unfunny shitwad he is would be time well spent. If we work together we can make him feel so bad he explodes in a giant fireball like one of his shitty cars.
I was going to complain yesterday that Oregon Public Broadcasting, the NPR affiliate down here, was still tweeting up a storm. Evidently Musk doesn’t realize they are “government funded”, so their accounts don’t have a label.
Many journalists and news organizations joined Twitter over the years to participate in a free-flowing environment of shared information and discourse, resulting in illuminating conversations that were not happening on other platforms. A series of seemingly arbitrary decisions by Twitter, along with its apparent disregard for the norms of journalism in America, now threatens to undermine our credibility and mission if we continue to use the platform as we have in the past.
Reporters also have to balance access. Their interviewees aren’t subpoenaed, they are there entirely voluntarily. If a reporter does “hard-hitting” reporting, then the people they want to “hit hard” simply refuse to appear.
It’s a self selection bias. Anyone that is going to hold a politicians feet to the fire simply isn’t going to get the opportunity. The reason you only see reporters who lob softballs is because those are the only ones that they will agree to be on.
I’m not saying that good journalists should or do lob softballs. I’m saying that politicians that don’t want to answer hard questions don’t accept interviews from good journalists.
They can always find someone willing to, as you say, “shill” for them.
Back when there were 3 TV stations, if a politician wanted to get any access to the public, they had to accept the terms of the journalist. Refusing to answer or lying would get them cut off. There were plenty of politicians to choose from, and not that much air time to go around.
Now the politician is the one with the choice of venue, and the politician is able to set the terms of the interview. If the journalist doesn’t like it, there are plenty of other news outlets that would be happy to treat them with kid gloves in order to fill their 24 hour news cycle.