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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   37635 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is the BBC state sponsored media? N. S. Lyons says yes

And while the BBC claims it can operate with nearly three-quarters of its funding coming from the government (whoops, I mean "the public”) and still remain independent in its coverage, this is clearly nonsense. Any organization that relies overwhelming on a patron for its continued financial existence will do what that patron wants. Obviously. And thanks to leaked emails and WhatsApp messages we can peruse a real time record of how the government leveraged this deference during the pandemic, with, for example, an “IMPORTANT ADVISORY” email sent from senior BBC editors to reporters informing them that Downing Street was “asking” if they could please avoid using the word “lockdown” to describe shutting people in up in their homes – and thus only “curbs” and “restrictions” appeared in BBC headlines the next day. This has hardly been limited to pandemic exceptions. As one BBC inside source told The Guardian: “Particularly on the website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.”

Edit: Paging @SSCReader per this earlier discussion

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

Twitter engagement is shit anyway (going by likes, re-tweets) anyway. NY Times has 50 million followers yet less engagement per tweet than nobodies with 50k followers. It's obvious that little traffic comes from people going to NPR's twitter page.

Zero people are going to be like "I was going to click that BBC/NPR link but since it's labeled as government media, I will read Fox News instead."

It’s an outgroup term, and one Western media has spent decades creating as an outgroup term. “State sponsored media” is quite often used to describe government sponsored media in other countries with the implication being that they’re not independent like the media in the West. There are two problems with this: first, that it falsely implies that everything produced by the media outgroup is completely false, and second that our media isn’t at least partially controlled by other means.

I don’t think controlled state media lies all the time, and in fact unless the lie benefits the regime in question to lie, they probably don’t lie any more often than other media does. If there’s a fire in a factory in China, Xinhua will probably be reasonably accurate about the event, how many were injured or killed, etc. They’re likely to report accurately on things the government says. They probably get the weather report fairly accurate as well.

And our media is controlled, not explicitly, but if you want access, you have to play the game. If you’re too negative on political figures, you won’t get access to those tips and interviews. If you report on something that you aren’t supposed to, you aren’t going to be invited to happenings and lose market share as your rivals break news first and get those big interviews and behind the scenes looks at something. You might even lose advertising if you report something that is too out-there for major brands.

NPR/PBS runs on patronage. The corporation for public broadcasting gives grants and allows shows access to their radio and tv shows. The more your content matches with stuff the inside-beltway likes seeing, the more likely you are to get funding and airtime. So almost everything on there is biased towards those viewpoints. Ben Shapiro couldn’t get on NPR no matter what he does because he doesn’t appeal to the people making the grant and airtime decisions. Things like Hardcore History won’t make the cut either.

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

Because this is a small step down the line to there not being a BBC or NPR any more, and they recognize the threat.

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

You're right, but as is often the case, there's a principal-agent problem here.

It doesn't matter to the institutional objectives or news-reporting teleological mission of the BBC or NPR what Twitter label they get. But to Terminally Online journos who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter and rely on it desperately for personal-brand-building? For journos who are working a job that pays them in status/prestige more than money? The cognitive dissonance is gonna cut deep when that hard-earned status is publicly threatened, traduced by their engagement platform of choice equating them to the very Kremlinoid fake-news trollfarms that the journos have been dunking on since 2016. It's like water suddenly declaring war on the fish. And so the journos (agents) will furiously burn the organisations' (principals') resources in a campaign to defend this slight on their own honour.

Not to go full Uncle-Ted-posting, but the oversocialised leftist is extremely vulnerable to this kind of attack.

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