Comment on Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

totallynotfbi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• dillydogg@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think their issue is that it misrepresents the magnitude of the funding. Less than 1% of their funding comes from the federal government

  source

  • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is that so? I thought it was a more significant source. But isn’t it technically correct, though? I’m not American, but Wikipedia says it was established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.

    source

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If they’re going to label NPR that way they should be fair about it and label the other news platforms as billionaire supported media.

      source

      • vidarh@lemmy.stad.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Labeling media with their significant owners and affiliations of board members would be a great thing. As long as it’d be uniformly applied… And as you’ve implied, that would certainly be unlikely to happen…

        source
      • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah, they totally should, but this is Elon Musk we’re talking about, unfortunately :/

        source
• drdabbles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If a person buys a home in the US and they qualify for a government secured first time buyer’s loan at their local bank, would you say that person is living in government housing? They aren’t. Likewise, if a person starts a small business, gets a loan from their local bank that is secured by the US small business loans program, is that a government company? Of course not.

  NPR is overwhelmingly supported by donations, trusts, advertising, etc. The government funding is more akin to a local art student getting tuition assistance or a grant of some kind. Which is pretty much the opposite of what Musk’s bullshit stunt was attempting to do- paint NPR as an arm of the government. Because all his idiotic new friends think that’s how it works and not one of them is curious enough to actually look it up.

  source

  • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh, I understand now, I’m not from the US so I just assumed that it was majority-funded. I’m just not sure why this would be a big deal even if NPR was government funded - I mean, it’s still better than a broadcaster owned by the media oligopoly, so who really cares?

    source

    • hasnt_seen_goonies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Great point. Many governments have media teams that produce propaganda and present it as news. This can be confusing, so social media sites label articles from these government entities as state-sponsored or whatever. It’s supposed to help Americans not trust propaganda that another country puts out, uncritically.

      source
    • drdabbles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The stigma of government affiliated news (here in the US at least) is that it makes the “news” a government mouthpiece. So there’s a distinction here between getting grant money from the government and effectively being the government.

      In other countries, like Canada and UK for instance, government media such as CBC and BBC are operated very different to how NPR operates, and they’re careful to put up a barrier between the rest of the government and the news agency. We can question how effective that barrier is, but we could also question how US corporate media outlets might allow advertisers to modify stories too. But in any even, what Musk was trying to do was equate NPR to some of the notoriously government run news outlets in the world because he’s a liar and a dirtbag.

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media

      source