Of Course NPR and the BBC are State Media
"National Public Radio (NPR) announced that it is leaving Twitter, after the platform “falsely labeled” it as “state-affiliated media.” This is the “the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries,” the indignant NPR huffed. Twitter CEO Elon Musk had the label changed to “government funded,” but this was still too much for NPR, which claims that – while it does receive government funds – such a label would tarnish its “credibility” and could somehow even “endanger journalists.”
Meanwhile the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is also throwing a hissy fit over being pasted with the same label, saying it “is, and always has been, independent,” and is merely “funded by the British public.” Also complaining is Voice of America (VOA), which, despite literally being run by an arm of the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, claims that, “The label 'government funded' is potentially misleading and could be construed as also 'government-controlled' – which VOA is most certainly not.”
Each outlet claims it maintains “editorial independence” from the state despite receiving government funding, and so doesn’t deserve to be called “state-affiliated.” Regardless of what you think of Musk or Twitter, this is absurd. Let’s leave aside VOA, which was literally founded to conduct information warfare abroad on behalf of the United States, first in WWII and then during the Cold War, and is therefore so obviously state-affiliated that its claims otherwise are not really worth addressing. The BBC and NPR are only marginally less obvious in being state media.
It would actually be more accurate, however, to call these outlets “Party-State” media...
These media outlets rely on government cash. This is most egregious in the case of the BBC, with 71% of its total revenue in 2022 coming from the BBC “licence fee”...
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.”
The government has no need to tell the
BBC what to write, however, merely to politely suggest, or to reach out
to “correct” some “misinformation,” and the BBC makes some voluntary
editorial changes, independently.
Canadian media is today another good example of how this works, what with Justin Trudeau’s government having rolled out a budget in 2019 pledging to hand out $600 million in new state subsidies to favored media companies, conveniently doing so just ahead of elections. Those determined to be “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations,” such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) got massive regulatory subsidies and tax credits; “unqualified” media got to try to compete against this cartel on their own. Understandably, Canadian media outlets therefore have a strong incentive to remain on the government’s good side. Thus when Trudeau wants something, such as to smear his opponents as Nazis, he has no need to do so himself; he need only wonder it aloud – “will no one rid me of these troublesome truckers?” – and his will be done, independently. Trudeau himself has since developed the confidence to quip in public that the media “lets us off the hook for a very good reason, because we paid them $600 million." But interpreting this as anything more than a joke is misinformation, according to fact checking conducted by Canadian state media (sorry: “publicly funded” media).
So as Musk himself put it to an NPR reporter: “If you really think that the government has no influence on the entity they're funding then you've been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long.” (NPR unironically described this statement as Musk having “veered into conspiratorial territory.”)
NPR also relies on government funding, though less so than their British and Canadian comrades. While NPR is loudly claiming it only receives about 1% of its money from the government, this downplays the reality by referring only the national-level organization and not to NPR’s local and affiliate radio stations, which do much of the actual work (and which then send a portion of their revenue upward). Those stations are far more reliant on government funding:
Funnily enough, NPR in the past hasn’t been shy at all about stating (over and over again) how utterly it relies on government funding. “Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR,” it still declares on its own website (bold in the original). “The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.”...
Anyone with enough experience abroad in the developing world may have heard the term “GONGO” before. A GONGO is a “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.” GONGOs are set up by governments to advance their interests “independently” through “civil society,” though typically no one in the more honestly corrupt parts of the world really pretends they are actually very independent. While often taking on flourishing lives of their own after their birth, such NGOs can help accomplish various missions helpful to the state, in all kinds of ways.
The “censorship-industrial complex” exposed by the “Twitter Files” is a telling example of this utility. When Washington’s permanent administrative state, including federal government agencies like the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department, set out after 2017 to protect the American public from ever voting the wrong way again by systematically filtering their access to information, they couldn’t do this all by themselves. So instead they adopted a “whole-of-society approach” to the “War on Disinformation” and set up a thick network connecting technology and media companies, universities, and NGOs, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy. Many of these outfits were in turn funded by the same group of aligned “philanthropic” foundations, such as the Knight Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. (The 20% of NPR funding coming from “Foundations” and “Colleges and Universities” should also take on new meaning in this context.) As a DHS memo first made public by the journalist Lee Fang described it, the explicit strategy was to use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda” due to their being formally independent “civil society” organizations...
When media like NPR want to claim “editorial independence” from state power they inevitably point to their reporters having relentlessly challenged the Trump administration. But this ignores the signal fact of American politics since 2016: Donald Trump was elected to the nation’s highest office, but was not a Party member in good standing. All the power of the Party instantly revolted against this intrusion, causing the all-consuming elite freak-out that ensued, has yet to subside, and will not subside until a similar oversight is deemed structurally impossible.
In such a closed party-state system very little direct coordination is necessary. Typically no editor has to be called up and told what to say. The pressure of ideological conformity easily serves this role"Conflict of interest is only a problem when the party is not liberal
