Influence is hard to quantify. It looks like somewhere between 1 and 10% of NPR’s funding comes from US and state government sources.
A 10% reduction in money is basically equivalent to a 10% reduction in head count, which isn’t insignificant. I could see that as being large enough to make someone who loves their employees question how far they were willing to press a politically-charged angle, if it wasn’t dire.
VOA and other sources, obviously, should be slapped with the label before NPR is so it is still stupid from that vantage. You can’t complain about sources being unreliable when your own system is capricious and motivated by something other than honesty.
Personally, I have no objection with the label but it should be applied consistently, though it would probably be better to split it into something like these two classifications or you’re really conflating some pretty drastically different things:
State influenced
State operated
A company with a 5-20% funding supply from some government might have a motivation to cover matters in a certain way, but they could always tighten their belt and last through a few years of hardship if they felt like it was necessary for the safety of the people. It doesn’t hurt to be made aware of the influence but a reasonable person might still pay attention to the source.
A company that’s directly controlled by the government is just as likely to be real news as propaganda (or real news propaganda, through selective coverage) and it should always be viewed with suspicion as nothing more than as a position piece from the government in question.
If we want to be as cynical as possible, they could look at how things run in Washington.
I believe that you need 3/5ths support to get a bill passed through the Senate. This means that if you cozy up to one of the two parties, they’re likely to support you all the way up until that 3/5ths limit is reached.
You could guarantee continued funding by selectively choosing to target one party for negative coverage and the other for positive.
If, at some point, the harmed party gains the majority then - finally - your funding could be cut. But, until that point, you’re relatively safe.
If, on the other hand, you are negative towards both parties then you risk losing both parties and losing funding.
The real test isn’t whether they say negative things, it’s whether they’re fair about it and negative to everyone.
Elmo is “a prodigy and a well-practiced problem solver”
[It’s] quite clear that Elon is a visionary, but is he good enough at coding? Well, yes
he has immense knowledge of multiple programming languages
Musk is not only a good coder but his tweets about technologies and cryptocurrencies adversely affect the market sentiments of the general public.
I have no idea what that last point means, and I’m sure that the Elmo sycophant who wrote the article doesn’t know, either. Also have no idea what “immense knowledge” of programming languages means. I can understand how someone can have good experience in one or more programming languages, but at what point does that cross over into “immense knowledge”?
In any case, one clear fact is that Elmo disbanded the Twitter media relations office and substituted the auto-reply poop emoji to tell the world how much he cares what they think.
Elon also banned a twitter account started to protest Musk’s decision, urging people to ignore/block anyone with the blue check mark. That movement also has a hashtag. Restoring only the celebs with the check may may be a counter to that. But either way Musk one again proves that he and twitter was never about freedom of speech.
I don’t know that I’d call it “stupid”. It’s trollish & jerky, sure.
It almost seems that he’s taking a page out of Trump’s book: just say outrageous shit for the fun of seeing your name light up in outrage all over the internet & conventional media. Then follow through on only a small fraction of the shit you say, because actually doing it was never the point in the first place.
To the degree he actually did reassign @NPR to some Reactionary Right mouthpiece, he / they could keep picking the real NPR’s scab indefinitely. While confusing some hefty fraction of the public. At least for a while. While forcing the real NPR to continually fight to keep the confusion at bay.
Destroying the public’s trust that the truth about anything is knowable and destroying trust that the world is reliable and predictable are both cornerstone ideas of nihilist government as practiced by tyrants such as Putin. And as practiced by propagandists such as the Murdochs.
The benefits to them of this approach are obvious. The dis-benefits to the rest of us are equally obvious
To be clear, that’s an app made by Instagram that will be a competitor to Twitter, not an app that competes with Instagram made by Twitter. Which is what I thought it would mean, but the headline is a bit ambiguous.
This looks very promising. Like everyone else, I’ve been annoyed with Twitter’s changes, but I’ve been reluctant to switch to something like Mastodon because few of the people I follow are there. On the other hand, everyone worth following is on instagram.
