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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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CanadaBC is leaving Twitter due to its tweets carrying the label "government-funded Media". This is particularly suprising, as unlike BritishBC or NipponHK, which are given government monopolies, but don't get money directly from the fiscus, CBC does. The Canadian state budget has an explicit provision that appropriates money appropriated from Canadian taxpayers to CBC.

The CBC on its own website even admits this fact in what might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen. If one isn't careful to look closely at the Y axis, one might miss that numbers from $700m to $1700m are omitted, thus making the 71.2% of the 2018/2019 budget which was given to it by the state, appear more 40%.

Both of these facts (objecting to being labeled GFM and the deceptive graph) point to CBC apparently thinking getting funds from the fiscus isn't a "good luck", thus it seeks play down this fact, by hook or by crook.

But why? Why would it be more shameful for a newsources sources of money be decided representatively democratically, where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight, than if it were owned by a billionaire like Bezos?

Someone poihnted out on Hacker News that that graph is only for one year and other years are not misleading.

elon is getting revenge on everyone in the media who shat on him in 2018-2020 or so, like regarding the cave rescue story and so on. this will continue

Don't forget the CBC is a crown corporation. Wholly owned by the Government of Canada.

I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words. If I owned twitter and slapped 'Murdoch owned media' on Fox twitter accounts, it would be indisputable but it clearly implies something about what I think about Fox and its biases. Similarly, Musk/twitter surely thinks that the fact that a particular outlet is government funded in some way impinges negatively upon its content because otherwise there would be no point putting it there.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with wrong with being government funded, but the label still carries unfortunate implications. After all, there are plenty of twitter users who will not be attuned to the difference between the Russian or Syrian regime shills labelled 'government affiliated media' and the state broadcasters labelled 'government funded media', and if not putting them in exactly the same bucket twitter does seem to be putting them in the same region, or at least that is the impression some people will take.

I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words.

This is of course the point. The American establishment uses terms like this as epithets to characterize their opponents, and simply avoids using these terms - even when literally true - for it's own mouthpieces. Now twitter is simply using these terms literally and in an unbiased manner and the establishment is losing their minds.

When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

(By "unbiased", I simply mean twitter seems to be applying a standard of "does their website say they get X% of their money from the government", at least based on Musk's tweets.)

Perhaps there could be a "This user has been convicted for committing securities fraud on Twitter" tag. Or even a "This Twitter user has declared under oath that reasonable people do not treat his tweets as factually accurate" tag.

Getting a tag isn't inherently negative. A bluecheck is technically also a tag that some people think negatively about, but on average it's still mainly a positive. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain kind of person would actually trust publications with a "government owned" tag more than one without, and the position that argues for this is mostly rather consistent and plausible, even if I may disagree with it (or more precisely, I think the funding matters for the direction, but not the degree of the bias).

On the other hand, I does seem to be rather petty from Musk, and I would actually prefer if everything gets a tag for its funding, not just public institutions. But I'm also in general someone who likes having lots of categories for everything.

I agree that this is twitter's intention. Nevertheless, unlike "hate speech" or similar tags that also may be technically correct according to some strenuously interpreted definition, most of the media currently up in arms are a) rather unambiguously government funded according to any sensible definition and b) "government funded" itself is not really a negative word in most context, even if the tag-givers in this specific context think it is, so it's easy to simply use it as a more informative tag anyway.

I would understand it if twitter chose "government propaganda" or similar labels that are much more contentious and clearly negative. To me this is just a really bad look; Twitter may think this is something negative on-net, but still deliberately uses a rather neutral & unambiguous word and people try to wriggle out of the label anyway with what looks like the platonic ideal of "lying with stats and figures". I'm not a fan that Twitter applies this labeling in a somewhat one-sided way, but it's still miles better than how other media has started using scary words for everything they don't like.

Sure, but now we're talking about something else. If the CBC wasn't trying to fool us this witlessly and simply tweeted something along the lines "yes, we're government funded, no, that's not a bad thing" and/or followed up with another "due to recent events, we do not have the impression that staying on twitter is beneficial for us, so we are leaving", our discussion would look quite different.

I think a moderate amount of hostility between different platforms/institutions/powerful actors is very good for society in a similar way to the idea of the separation of power in the government. Hence, I think that Twitter being run by a controversial person like Musk is positive for the world, and I think it's a pity if everyone starts migrating to services that are again a little to friendly with the hegemonic media/academia/political consensus position. But it's not really something I'd fault anyone in particular for. It's only natural that you move to where you feel most comfortable & welcome.

There's two ways to handle it - one is to prove not all government funded media is the same (one may start by not using deceptive tricks like the graph described above) and another is to scream "how dare you publish true information about us" and ragequit. CBC chose the latter, because the former is probably too hard for them.

I file that under "their own damn fault". For decades they've been demonizing foreign government media funding while responding with a dismissive "totally different" to anyone who points out they get a lot of government funding. The CBC is big enough and powerful enough that it's employees can isolate themselves from criticism they don't want to hear.

Perhaps this is a mistake with our current economic regime? I’d argue that due to economic complexity the average citizen should be more aware of who owns the product or service they’re consuming, rather than less.

Hell, I’d vote for a law that forced companies to display their owner if they do get acquired.

I feel much the same. The issue at hand is who’s paying for the news. The tag isn’t defamatory — the media in question are government funded. Fox is owned by Murdoch. The biases to the extent they exist are created in the minds of the reader. On the other hand, without telling people who’s paying that group to produce the news, no intelligent decisions can be made about the trustworthiness of any given source. More light will eventually lead to truth, as people learn to be better news consumers.

I suspect that a lot of the drama over these media outlets not wanting to be on Twitter because they’re being labeled is that they don’t like the smears that have been done using the idea of government funding (in regimes we don’t like) as a stand in for regime mouthpiece.

where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight

I completely disagree with that. Is there really a meaningful difference between how much influence the average person has over Bezos and a government? I would argue both rounds down to zero. With Bezos, people can at least boycott his companies and refuse to fund him directly. They don't have that option with governments.

A rich person, on the other hand can have a lot of influence over a government, but very little over Bezos.

people can at least boycott his companies and refuse to fund him directly.

In theory, at least, much in the same way you disagree with the power of plebian voting.

I think other rich people also have at least a little more than "very little" influence on Bezos. Scott, meanwhile, thinks that rich people have surprisingly less influence over government, but I don't know that this has ever been measured then or now.

The thing about the plebian vote is that it doesn't matter all that much right up to the point that it is arguably the only thing that matters. And where that point exactly is is often obfuscated both by the inherent difficulties of gathering and collating information across a large population/geographic area, and by the machinations of smarter plebians who recognize that any ambiguity tends to work in their favor.

After all, if your opponent knows exactly how far they can push beforehand, all they're going to do is push until they reach that point. As such it's better to leave them guessing about where exactly the line in the sand lies.

might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen

I urge folks to take a look at this graph. Peak comedy.

Wow yeah, that's good enough to be one of the example graphs in "How to Lie with Statistics".

Masterpiece of a stacked bar chart.

Look at that subtle axis breakage, the tasteful placement of it. Oh my god, components are even split out into different columns.

The AI-art naysayers are right; there’s no way AI can generate art with this much soul and creativity.

Really gives the impression of an organization doing its level best to be transparent and honest. Can you imagine still questioning their integrity after looking at that?

I wonder if the government told them to hush up their involvement, or if it just seemed like the obvious choice.

This is one of the worst graphs I’ve ever seen.

Not only is it wildly misleading, it’s a perversion of the concept of a bar graph! The adjacent columns don’t compare data, they just break it out into components. I assume the creator chose this because he couldn’t make a pie chart that cheats so hard.

There are only five pieces of information on each chart. We’re approaching Pravda levels. Tufte must be spinning in his—wait, he’s still alive. He should be informed of this tragedy, but sending this graph might be considered harassment.

I assume the creator chose this because he couldn’t make a pie chart that cheats so hard.

I can't recall where I saw it, but I saw some newspaper clipping a while back that just straight-up had no correlation between the pie chart size and the percentage. With subtle manipulation, this would be hard to detect and could even be plausibly denied as intentional manipulation rather than carelessness, but this one, IIRC, had a sliver with a number greater than 50% over a slice whose arc was clearly under 180 degrees. It certainly made me more careful about paying close attention to every part of a chart and their correlation to the underlying data whenever I encountered a chart in some article. Which kind of defeats the purpose of charts, but what can you do.

The fixed version highlights the absurdity of the original: https://twitter.com/politicalmath/status/1648299180945801218

This is some Lib Dem Bar Charts level nonsense, wow. There's lying with statistics and then there's this.

Lib Dem Bar Charts

Wild. My go-to was always DefenseCharts, but that’s a much better example for actual numeric nonsense.

At this point, I think that the smarter Lib Dems use bar graphs simply to amuse and catch the attention of sad and overly political nerds, who are one of the groups who will still consider voting for them. It's self-parody that only the people who like proportional representation will understand, or at least I hope it's self-parody...

sad and overly political nerds

This comment is too boo outgroup and antagonistic.

As a long-term Liberal Democrat and statistics geek, I resent this aggressive moderation of a factually accurate. After three or more pints of Real Ale (20 oz pints - we're British) the finer points of the Single Transferable Vote and Site Value Rating are quite exquisitely interesting to sad and overly political nerds such as myself.

CanadaBC BritishBC NipponHK

These are non-standard ways to refer to these entities, at first I thought you were referring to some kind of official Twitter account of British Columbia.

I assumed it was done for some purpose, but I can't imagine what.

I can, but AmericanBC would kinda ruin the pattern.

Hey, hands off: British Columbia is ours (or maybe the First Nations people's—though that's a culture war for another day) ;-)

Why would it be more shameful for a newsources sources of money be decided representatively democratically, where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight, than if it were owned by a billionaire like Bezos?

These aren't the only options. Government funding isn't necessarily "decided representatively democratically", regardless of whether a country has democratically elected leaders. It seems to me that many people intuit that government funding and affiliation will tend to create news networks that tend to present stories with a given valence and that the people that work for these networks are deeply offended by anyone suggesting that it is so. If they thought there was nothing wrong with being government funded and affiliated, they would make that argument clearly and forcefully rather than taking their ball and going home when they are correctly identified as such.

But why?

Because NPR did it?

I know this comes across as uncharitable. I'll attempt to defend it regardless.

I honestly don't know if you can live here and not see how the phrase from a former Canadian leader that whenever America sneezes Canada gets a cold isn't true culturally as well as economically. Trump starts threatening DREAMers? Canadian outlets start talking about whether to take them. Some black guy dies in America? BLM is in Canada despite the death toll being much smaller miniscule. Kids shot in America? Gun control comes up again. Trump wins? Women's March.

There seems to be a class of Canadians who desperately want a bit of American political melodrama, either as eager auxiliaries or as smug signalers of how much better and how distinct Canada is.

IME the Canadian media class and intelligentsia is especially prone to this sort of signaling. I think it's because the entire industry is detached due to being next to the US and its overwhelming cultural might which lets the CBC be a failure with fewer consequences - everyone is already watching American TV and getting caught up in American political drama anyway.

Canada is basically in thrall culturally to the US (this is recognized by box office tallies that basically fold Canadian ticket buyers into the "Domestic" category). And this leads to them adopting ideas that are already dubious in the case of American politics (NPR's complaint in this case) but also just make no sense outside (e.g. Britons adopting The Knee in their protests against racism)

I was amused by South Park’s take on this dynamic, where electing Trump lead to Canada building a border wall.

ABC Australia and the SBS have also been labelled, but they have given signs that they don't plan to throw a fit about it.

I wonder what the difference is.

It might be that the abc and sbs have a better relationship with the public - even though they often push progressive propaganda, they still have an affectionate place in a lot of Australians' hearts, because even in the 21st century there were a lot of places in Australia where they were the only television channels you could access. There have been some big pushes by some of the conservative media in Australia to get the government to reduce their funding, but they get a lot of push back from more rural areas.

The CBC used to be this at least through the 90s -- I used to have the radio on in the background essentially all through my waking hours.

Now I basically only listen at all in the truck, and play a kind of social justice bingo where I switch the station after hearing two egregious CW statements by hosts or 'expert guests'.

I can usually get through the hourly news, but that's about it -- there's roughly four half-hour segments per week that I don't mind listening to, plus a bunch of Toronto bubble stuff that's not that interesting but fairly unoffensive. (mainly unfunny comedians that can't survive on their own merits)

This is actually pretty sad for me -- to the extent that "government funded" is not a sin in and of itself, I appreciated the radio as a way of tying the country together -- Peter Gzowski, or political comedy shows that lampooned all the silly politicians equally I would argue had value inasmuch as they could espose the nation to quirky stories that they wouldn't otherwise hear about. It's a big country after all. This activity probably wouldn't be commercially successful, but did create a cohesive national identity -- so as government functions go, there are worse ones.

Now that it's all white-guilt all the time, might as well burn it with fire I guess -- but the dream would be to fire virtually everyone and send offer letters to the people still slogging it out in small-town newspapers across the country, with a mandate to inform instead of indoctrinate. (burn it with fire it is, then)

Well, aren't Canadian broadcasters obliged by law to piss away some fraction of their budget on French-language shows to appease the Quebecois? That seems like a pretty huge blow to their competitiveness.

I think the French arm actually makes shows that are pretty broadly popular in Quebec (ie. competitive with American network stuff) so I'm not sure "piss away" is the right term.

Honestly, you are probably being too charitable.

I'd be willing to bet that if you cut a similar proportion of the budget for UK productions the BBC would still put out better and more popular material than CBC is managing.

(Come to think of it: does the UK not have carveouts for regional media? Cause I'd assume otherwise)

The UK has strong carveouts for 'regional media', the BBC relocated much of its production staff to Manchester for example

To drive home the point that the British government says "jump" and the BBC says "how high?", iirc this move was a purely political one after the Tory government started getting flack that it's economic policy was rabidly London-centric while ignoring everywhere else in the country. So they compelled the BBC to move a bunch of shit to Manchester. The median cosmopolitan bourgie-urbanite BBC employee would consider "relocation to Manchester" the equivalent of being exiled to Siberia, and it caused a lot of whining and gnashing of teeth within the BBC. But their putative independence was as nothing compared to the Tories' determination to win themselves votes at the next election from Norf FC by "bringing them jobs".

Timing wise you are at least incorrect as the decision was taken in 2006 while Tony Blair was prime minister.

I don't remember us putting pressure on the Beeb, though the rumor was it was a gambit so that Blair would be more lenient in the Charter renegotiations.

I appreciate the correction. It does not, however, detract from the central thesis that the government points and the BBC goes.

The problem I think for Canada is that it's right next to the most productive soft power generator in history. It's just very difficult for it to carve out a separate identity and industry that can distinguish itself - in part because it's too late: lots of Canadians basically are Americans

I live in southern Ontario. My family lives in Maryland. When I was in college I would cross the border every semester and, honestly, the French on labels was the main tell.

Like...take some of Britain's most successful exports like Downton Abbey: it's popular precisely cause a lot of us don't have that sort of British fussiness about nobility. Same reason the royal family makes waves in the States.

To most of the world Canadians are Americans. And attempts to insist on a distinct Canadian identity (putting aside Quebec's...particularities) often end up looking boring and soulless like the CBC or what basically accounts to bland virtue signaling

It's much easier to basically be used as a stand-in by the US' much larger industry than to truly compete with it. Especially since there's no functional barrier to talented Canadians going down south and making a ton more money which is a constant drain on talent.

Acting is a global business, or at least an Anglosphere-wide business, and British, Canadian and American actors, directors and so on are repped by the same agencies that the CBC could contract.

Isn't that part of the problem? If you are in the industry and want to/can do well America is always calling with a potentially better deal.

Like...Denis Vileneuve might be my favorite Canadian director. He doesn't do Dune for a Canadian company. If he wants that, it's the US and Zendaya or nothing.

A lot of energy is also getting sucked up working on American productions within Canada. I remember Max Landis talking about how competitive Vancouver is for resources. A lot of people (especially below-the-line) are probably "wasting" their time working on shows that could be Canadian in that utterly unspecific way but are still wallpapered as American. Why not? Both markets will watch it.

Seems like things somewhere along the line got optimized for working for with the US industry rather than independence.

The only Canadian show I can name off the top of my head is the Trailer Park Boys and I’m not even sure if it’s a cbc production

Allow me to introduce you to Letterkenney.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9rSBmOgpcDE

I think that for the longest time, from a European vantage point, the Canadian brand was essentially being nice + some sort of chill lack of pretense in an outdoorsy lumberjack way (like Australia with moose). I realise that in the Americas the second half is laid claim to by several parts of the US too, but I don't think this makes it across the ocean (as "US + outdoorsy lumberjack" immediately mutates into "alcoholic with a pickup truck, multiple shotguns and married to his cousin").

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