>On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.
It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.
They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence.
This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.
That could apply to a huge portion of all businesses on Twitter. How many of the F500 have benefitted from a gov't bailout or some other taxpayer subsidy. No one is really squeaky clean on this front.
This is an excellent point. If you review my comment history I think you’ll find some of my most downvoted comments being about how rolling out the biggest infringements upon civil liberties since WWII, and then creating a financing program that media companies rely upon to survive, was one of the most corrupt things I’d seen during my life time.
To call NPR state-affiliated media to abuse the term to the point of incoherence. You may as well, by your own logic, say every media company ultimately has at least one dollar that's passed through the government and is thus state-affiliated. Thus they all deserve the label. Thus the label is meaningless, which incidentally, appears to be the point of this authoritarian-apolgistic nonsense.
It's continued abuse of language in the hopes of making it impossible for people to determine what's true -- in the hopes of making people give up even caring about facts.
I like how, nowhere in that entire two paragraphs were you able to explain why it's not state-affiliated when its funded by the government. All you did was try to shove the label off because other media is possibly also funded the same way.
I’ve left a number of comments on this thread arguing why this is not a reasonable comparison and so have other people. And you specifically were bringing up the topic of funding, so I was avoiding going off the rails too much.
If I have understood you correctly you were concerned by funding being cut off. Why would that not be a concern with other media, not receiving any government funds, as well? I also do not really understand why you are more concerned with government dependencies than with any other dependencies. Actually I think the latter dependencies might be the stronger influence on a media company, especially if it is a large part of the budget.
not necessarily. It just means it's not as bad as it would be in China or Russia.
NPR knew the democrats would be back in power in a couple of years...they weren't risking much by being anti-Trump. But they did gain goodwill from the democrats, which can extend them support every time they are in power.
I am not arguing for or against either side, I am just pointing out a flaw in your logic.
I think NPR is so solidly on the democrats side, that it's hard to distinguish what came first: the chicken or the egg?
>On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.
It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.