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Is the BBC state sponsored media? N. S. Lyons says yes
Edit: Paging @SSCReader per this earlier discussion
I largely agree, although I still think there’s some value in holding these people to the same standards that they hold their counterparts in Bad Countries like Russia and Iran to. If you were to make this argument as a defense of Russia Today, saying, “The fact that they’re funded by the Russian government is irrelevant; the viewpoint advocated by RT is due to the kinds of people who work for RT, and the people who listen to it,” there is no chance in hell that the NPR audience would consider that defense remotely credible.
So, if they want to believe that “state-affiliated media” is a valid and useful category, then pointing out the obvious parallels is a useful way to humiliate and undermine them. I’m not necessarily saying this is the best approach - I think that maintaining intellectual coherence and actually having good arguments is probably more important than “owning the libs”, although my confidence in that view is fraying - but I do think it’s probably the best thing that Elon Musk can do, because these people are actively trying to destroy him, leveraging every bit of sophistry and media manipulation that they can muster; for that reason, Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible.
But NPR's quality is leagues above russian and iranian state media. And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against. There really is a kind of "state-run media" that the soviets had, and that Russia today has, that the US doesn't have today. Trying to pave over that distinction as an 'own' makes your concerns, even when otherwise correct, look silly and easily dismissible.
... It's just musk doing yet another epic musk thing, like "legacy verified. may or may not be notable". Robbing power? NPR continues to post exactly what they did a month ago, the same people as last month trust it or don't trust it, etc. Nobody's been demoralized.
(I didn't expect NPR to ragequit twitter though, that was dumb)
It's correct! You agree it's correct! Letting people who hate you lie to your face and doing nothing, not even calling them liars, because you don't want to look 'silly' is cuckoo.
I agree that [NPR bad], although I'd phrase it more generally in terms of progressives/universa/etc. I do not agree that [NPR is state media implies NPR is bad] is correct. A smart liberal will just respond ... like above, "NPR often criticizes democrats, chinese media doesn't criticize Xi, my standards are reasonable". Is Xi Jinping said the COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the data says otherwise one of the top duckduckgo results for "site:globaltimes.cn Xi Jinping"? It is for biden / npr! Yeah, 50 stalins, but that's not the argument either elon or grandparent comments are making. You can't kill anything by striking at shadows!
Yeah, NPR is offensive to me in two independent ways, one of which is related to it being state-media and one of which is not: First, I don't like its political and cultural biases, which NPR happens to share with almost all other sources of news media regardless of funding source. I don't see NPR as significantly more pro-state than most of its privately-owned peers. Removing the public funding is not likely to improve NPR's reporting in any noticeable way.
But I also strongly object to the fact that I'm forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values. It's not that state funding is necessarily corruptive of the final product (though it almost certainly is, to at least some extent), so much as the American people should not be forced to subsidize a news network that seems to actively despise them. Subsidies are bad regardless of whether the recipient feels obligated to the subsidizer or not.
These are two bad things about NPR, but only one of them has anything to do with its source of funding.
A fact check I skimmed implies that, generously, 23% of NPR's revenue is apparently
~$309M. US federal govt revenue $4.90 trillion. That's 0.001450408163265306% of federal revenue - if you paid $50k in taxes, 72 cents of it went to NPR. Given half of the US loves NPR's values, "my tax dollars!!" isn't a good objection here. It's better for something like welfareAll you've done is demonstrate the pernicious problems associated with the distributed costs and concentrated gains of government subsidies. It may not be much individually, but in the aggregate, a lot of good/harm can be done with $309 million. At what point am I allowed to start caring about my tax dollars being spent on things I morally disagree with? Am I not allowed to oppose the government torturing people in my name (water boarding and attaching people to car batteries isn't exactly expensive)? It's not really about the money, it's about not providing implicit support to things I oppose. The government shouldn't be spending any amount of money producing politically charged propaganda aimed at its own citizens; the fact that I'm not personally bankrupted by it doesn't make it any less objectionable.
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Who are you to decide how much @thorouglygruntled needs to pay for taxes before he can object? How much of his money goes into other people pockets, by force, before he can be against that?
It's not a numbers argument but a moral one.
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What i find interesting about your second paragraph is that it applies really well to people who want to defund the police. People shouldn't have to pay the government for the government to buy guns and train guys to come point the guns at you. Maybe worrying about government programs that literally entail pointing guns at citizens is more salient than being upset that the state is funding propaganda, gesturing in the direction of some theoretical gun being pointed.
You're allowed to oppose the government funding more than one thing at a time.
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I don't know what an arrow means grammatically, but those are two separate statements. Npr is bad, and Npr is state funded. Which do you disagree with? If your concern is that progressives can easily dismiss it, my response is so what? Ideologues can dismiss anything which makes their ideology look bad, and a post modern ideologue barely has to even think about it for two seconds.
Besides which, regardless of how they could respond, they have chosen to respond by getting bent out of shape about it! The media is the progressive shadow, it covers for all their shenanigans. And accurately labelling these media organisations isn't striking at it, it is merely adding more light.
Sorry, the arrow was supposed to mean 'implies'. People say 'NPR is state media' to imply that that state-medianess is bad, causes bias or corruption. But that's not true - NPR would be just as bad, and self-censor just as much, if it was subscription-funded. There's little similarity between the ways US and chinese media are 'bad'. If you actually want to hurt NPR, believing that 'NPR is state media' just misdirects you - as elaborated above, removing their state funding wouldn't change anything! It's like, if you hate guns, saying "school shooting! assault rifle!" - it riles up the base, it convinces people, but the only thing they're convinced of is murky, non-actionable ideas.
I mentioned progressives easily dismissing it because Hoff said elon was doing good work by 'humiliating' and 'demoralizing' progressives. It being trivial to dismiss means it doesn't do that very well!
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It has, it's just for external consumption: VoA, RFE/RL and other USAGM operations are exactly the kind of "state-run media" RT is.
But you're right about the media for internal consumption. If the first thing Biden did after his inauguration was have the FBI arrest Murdoch and let him leave the US only after he sold his stake in Fox to Bursima Holdings, this would be comparable to the level of control over media Putin had even back when almost everyone considered him a reliable partner.
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Do you really believe that?
... yes? Does not-being-progressive mean I must never put a progressive institution and a positive word in the same sentence? Must I be like the sibling comment who thinks the $recent_left_wing_issue is the WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN IN HISTORY?
NPR has problems - boring and often misleading 'general news' reporting, biased towards democrats, 'obnoxiously woke', whatever else. But we're comparing it to this. Or Russia Today. I'd drink soy milk over sewer water.
I really do think NPR is uniquely bad here. It’s truly mind-numbing to listen to, whereas something like CNN isn’t.
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NPR completely and explicitly buried a story about major corruption from a presidential candidate and his son's overseas business dealings, in order to hand that preferred candidate the election. I'd challenge to to find a more-impactful example of corruption censorship from any other news media in world history.
"Completely and explicitly"? Huh? Chinese reports on corruption of Xi's son wouldn't look like (pre-2020 election) this - or explicit coverage of a biden sexual assault allegation
Because political leaders in China can have stories, or entire topics, pulled at their discretion!
:/ Not sure how to respond to this? Chinese media reporting on Xi's consolidation of power? Saudi media reporting on MBS's purges?
"Completely" as in zero coverage. "Explicitly" as in they came right out and said "We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listener’s and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions”
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Accusing Biden Sr of sexually assaulting a grown-woman is not exactly damaging when he's recorded on camera grooming multiple little girls.
If anything it helps.
Regarding Hunter, why write he was paid 50k a month instead of the actual number? Oh, just 50k?
What about his actual qualifications? What makes him worth 50k a month? Is there anything that connection to his father would bring to Burisma?
They asked Burisma for comments, not Hunter?
Here's a piece from the NYP about the media's undying support for Biden
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I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away. Oh, and also, those refugees? Doctors, lawyers, scientists. White People are only 56% of the births now? Nah, that's not important news, no need to report that.
Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.
Oh, you can get both, except that the Chinese government might literally lock you in your house (or rather apartment building) because you might catch a cough.
Chinese/Saudi media does that too. You might be surprised how much people in China trust state media.
How sure are you that China's approach to lockdowns are any worse than in the west? Most western countries had universal lockdowns, often long, and often multiple of them. China tended to have shorter regional lockdowns. When it comes to time spent under lockdowns, the average person in Europe likely faced a greater level of lockdown than the average person in China. Perhaps more tellingly, the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them. Both are utterly despicable, but the CCP was already regarded as illegitimate pre-2020.
I have to wonder how much of "China lifted lockdowns in reaction to outcry" is a result of optics, where even the CCP realized "this looks really bad" WRT things like Shenzhen(?) going hungry and the government having to deploy drones that broadcasted stuff like "please control your soul's desire for freedom." I imagine even the Bluest parts of North America wouldn't think to write something that sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang.
Why would China have worse optics for, approximately, doing the same lockdowns that many other places around the world have seen, complete with hunger and nigh-satire levels of totalitarian imagery?
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Western repression is a sieve, Chinese repression is a dam. A dam fully contains dissent until it reaches emergency levels. Canada could treat its protestors roughly because they didn't reflect a level of discontent that could threaten the regime.
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My point is about media, not policies.
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Does it make sense to attribute the lockdowns to 'censorship and propaganda' being 'deployed'? It seems to have, much moreso, been a 'decentralized consensus' among national, state, and local experts, media, bureaucrats, etc. It was bad, but the cause of the bad thing wasn't censorship and propaganda. Anti-lockdown censorship was bad, but it wasn't load-bearing. Being against lockdowns (and vaccines, etc) became pretty partisan, and I don't think less censorship would've made blue people change their minds back then. Would Rs have become more anti-lockdown?
Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'. You make an argument for the former, but nothing for the latter. The media is bad, but bad in an entirely different way!
When it comes to whether lockdowns depended upon censorship and propaganda to exist is not relevant to whether we should regard organisations that were paid to put out that propaganda by states as state sponsored.
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They actually admitted to using propaganda several times. They decided as policy early on, to imply that masks don’t work (they later reversed course). They have admitted to trying to scare people into compliance by playing up the deaths (which is why there was major reporting on hospitals being overwhelmed, nurses and doctors nearing burnout (and dancing), and the ubiquitous “death clocks” in every major news outlet). It was a master class in narrative creation, down to the anti-opposition propaganda (misinformation!, anti-science, killing grandma) and the videos of people being thrown out of various stores for refusing masks.
I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu. And tbh, had we treated flu to the same level of propaganda, the results would’ve been roughly similar. People would absolutely panic, because more people than you think die of flu every year. We just don’t put up giant deathclocks on the nightly news.
This is false.
We can argue over exactly what rate of death and severe side effects is acceptable and what mitigations are acceptable to reduce those rates, but COVID-19 causes a lot more of both than any flu we've seen other than the 1918 one, including among the young and healthy. Previously young and healthy people becoming majorly disabled by Long COVID is something that happens, albeit rarely. I'm not sure where to get the best data on this, but the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season, but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure, partially because studies vary widely in their definitions. And it's unclear how to define a fair comparison because getting the flu rarely happens more than once a year and usually significantly less often while COVID-19 infections happening multiple times a year is common.
Mind, the flu poses very little danger to the young and healthy, so even a lot more dangerous than the flu can quite reasonably fit inside your acceptable risk profile. But treating them as the same is not accurate.
(And, uh, maybe it wouldn't be terrible if we took some measures to strengthen our protection against airborne pandemics like improving ventilation and accidentally reduced flu prevalence as a side effect.)
Which puts it in the range of the Hong Kong Flu and Asian Flu, two mostly-forgotten pandemic flus in the latter half of the 20th century.
We know no such thing.
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How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.
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This is the wrong phrasing, since we already knew all that by February 2020. Propaganda and so-called opponents of disinformation instead propagated disinformation that it was otherwise.
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Didn't government agents (FBI and/or state department) request Twitter censor specific antivaxxers?
Hard to believe this was decentralized.
Perhaps a better word instead of 'government controlled media' is deep state.
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In the US it's not state-owned media, it's media-owned state.
How much coverage did NPR have of Hunter Biden's adventures?
How bad are Russian and Iranian non-state media?
NPR is horribly biased.
For a month they will run dozens of times a day the same jingle/trailer with half a dozen quips that they think best represent their content.
One of the quips they had was 'accusatory voice talking about Trump' about his impeachment or something like that.
If you listened to it for a couple hours you heard several times somebody implying authoritatively that Trump did something bad.
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