So, a 1% budget reduction would cause the system to collapse?
“Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s president, warned in a statement on Thursday that the Trump budget proposal, if enacted, could cause “the collapse of the public media system itself.””
Not going to debate NPR’s finances. It is beside the point, off topic, and gives way too much credit to Musk’s idiotic classification of NPR as state controlled media. It isn’t.
I see your point. But the “varying degrees of government involvement” statement is vague enough to cover the common and generalized scenario where the feds see something they don’t like, and threaten to cut off federal funding. The feds may not be writing NPR’s content, but NPR is also not truly independent, so I think Musk is more right than he is wrong in this case.
I never thought Musk would go through with the transaction.
But, now we are in a world where a very rich narcissist can use what was a useful platform as a vehicle for his personalized, narcissistic whims and his political agenda. It does seem to be declining at a reasonable pace. It would have been a lot less expensive to settle the original lawsuit.
With respect to the classification of state-affiliated media, Twitter’s actual rules used NPR and BBC as examples of entities that were not state-affiliated. They’ve apparently taken down those rules.
@bluebayou’s argument that organizations whose donors receive charitable deductions are state-supported and not independent seems fatuous when taken to its logical extreme. Are churches state-supported, non-independent entities? All churches benefit from the charitable tax deduction. It seems that @bluebayou is not a fan of NPR’s political cast. No issue there, you are welcome to that opinion. While it may feel good to argue that benefitting from charitable tax deductions makes it a state-supported entity, the argument misses the mark.
I think there is a reasonable argument that religious institutions, especially those that have explicit political messages and political arms, shouldn’t be beneficiaries of tax-exempt status. (for a few examples, pastor declares democrats satanic at DuckDuckGo). Maybe the same could be said for NPR.
So wait, a few years ago Donald Trump’s White House was somehow dictating content to NPR? I think you’re less right than wrong.
Funny tweets out there pointing out the 4.9B in subsidies Musk’s companies have received (as of 2015, likely significantly higher now). And of course there’s those federal contracts with SpaceX.
Logically, I think Musk’s own twitter account should also be labeled as government funded. And that’s not even counting the significant Saudi investment. “State-affiliated” might even be more accurate since I’m sure Musk won’t post anything anti-Saudi that would tee off the kingdom.
Note that the BBC’s Twitter account is now characterized as “Publicly funded media” which seems more accurate than NPR’s “Government-funded media” label.
Given the differences in punctuation, these labels are clearly being applied individually according to Musk’s whims.
Decrying shadow banning and getting a guy to write an article about Old Twitter’s purported shadow banning then proceeding to shadow ban said guy was honestly enough irony + hypocrisy to make me chuckle all day.
Yes @anomander. That was a tour de force performance. Hard to outdo that although I think Jim Jordan can sometimes be world class in that department…
Musk continuing his crusade to drive journalists and news organizations off twitter. For a guy who owns a social media company, I’m not sure he understand how social media works.
That’s assuming he wants to actually make twitter successful that is; if he‘s just out to mess with people and organizations he doesn’t like then he’s clearly having a great time. Which if you’re a billionaire, why not spend your billions having fun?
He has made clear what he wants Twitter (or X-app?) to be. He wants it to become a “super everything” app, that makes money primarily from people transacting on its app, rather than from advertising as the current app/model is. Advertisers, and influencers who attract traffic, would be less important in that business model.
Well I guess building a reputation for flakiness and unreliability is one way to build an app that people will trust with their money.
I mean at least it hasn’t exploded yet.
Thanks for the links, I do appreciate counter-narratives, it’s important to avoid group think. However, the opinion article doesn’t really provide facts – Elon claims that Twitter will be cash positive soon, so that would interesting if that happens, but we won’t know it other than Elon’s word because it’s a private company.
Most articles I’ve read estimate ad revenue to have collapsed and have not come back. Without SEC filings we won’t actually know the truth.
Not literally, but at least metaphorically…
“How did the Twitter checkmark become toxic? It took multiple strokes of business failure: First by Musk making Twitter worse, second by charging more for Twitter Blue at the same time he was making the site worse, and third by making himself an unappealing person for people to associate themselves with in public. The masses are not balking at paying for Twitter Blue because they’re trying to shelter themselves within a crumbling elitist internet order, but because they think Musk is offering an unworthy product and is also a dickhead.”
All of this. My favorite is a photo I saw recently of a Tesla owner with a bumper sticker that reads: “We bought it before we knew he was an a**hole” 
I want that sticker!!
And now Musk thinks he’s gonna buy Alcatraz island and move twitter Hq there?? There has to be a good joke in there somewhere. Elon Musk Shocks the World With Plans for New Twitter HQ on Alcatraz Island - Architizer Journal