It's pretty funny that two big dramatic things in #USPolitics right now is Thomas taking vacations with friends (how dare he not disclose that?!) and NPR accepting money from the US government (how dare #Twitter disclose that?!).
Well, funny might not be the right word.
It's sad. But this is Fediverse.
@volkris
In other words:
1- how dare a Supreme Court judge not respect the law ?
2- how dare Twitter categorize a news organization as "state-funded" when it's not?
Some people care about law and order, apparently.
You have both complaints factually backwards.
It's funny because even these news organizations are admitting that they are state-funded--and seriously who even denies that?--as they maintain that the state funding they receive is small.
It's one thing to say we should be clear that the funding is a small part of the budget. It's another to deny that they funding they received doesn't happen.
@volkris it's a play on words. If you were gifted just the books for your university courses from the State and had to pay the tuition and all the rest, you wouldn't say your education is "state-funded", would you?
I absolutely would!
Hell just today I was hearing an ad from a liberal arts college in the US that is very proud of not being funded by the US government at all, including indirectly through students taking out subsidized loans.
Funding is funding. NPR accepts funding from the federal government, so it is federally funded, and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out. They are welcome to stop taking that money, in which case they would no longer be federally funded, but apparently it's worth it for them to take it. And there's nothing strange about that.
It's like, NPR often runs little disclaimers that they accept money from other organizations that they report on, so why not embrace this one too?
And again, it's always this weird thing where they keep trying to say it's such an insignificant amount of money... which fine, then if it is so little, maybe they should stop taking it so that they can have total independence from a government that they would be reporting on.
But so long as NPR and PBS accept government funding, they are main government funded. Again, not there's anything wrong with that.
@volkris "so long as NPR and PBS accept government funding, they are main government funded" is a leap in reasoning, I think.
And if musk wants to brand state-funded organizations, what about Tesla or SpaceX? Tesla made more money out of the credit carbon scam than out of car sales, not to mention all the subsidies, the tax credits granted to Tesla buyers, etc...
It's pure hypocrisy from Musk.
Already in May 2015:
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html
SpaceX is also government funded. I don't know what that bit of whataboutism really contributes to the debate.
One issue is that SpaceX is not positioning itself as an independent group with reporting that would be holding government accountable. That's the conflict of interest that the press has when it accepts money from the organization it reports on.
Like SpaceX, NPR accepts government funding. Like SpaceX NPR is literally government-funded. There's nothing weird about owning that choice.
When Musk sets up a press agency that takes government money without labeling it, then you'd have a point.
But the conflicts of interest being labeled here just aren't the same between a press agency and a car company.
@volkris then, according to your own logic, if a news organisation should be labelled "state-funded" when it receives 11% of its funds from the State, a Supreme Court Justice should be labelled "GOP-bought" when they have accepted important gifts from a Gop donor. This judge should not only disclose it, but advertize it, no? Because of these same conflicts of interest.
You do know the job of a Supreme Court justice is not to report on the GOP... right?
Like, you know those are different career paths that do completely different jobs in different institutions with different rules and different checks on their roles in society?
But most directly, journalists appeal to the public. Justices appeal to the legal institution and to Congress. Completely different interests involved.
I can go on and on about how illogical that comparison is, about how those apples and oranges are worlds apart.
@volkris the job of a Supreme Court Justice is to interpret the Law. And they do it according to their own beliefs and values, or according to the beliefs of those who bought them. It's politics, same as when a news organization reports on the state. Who they report to is irrelevant. A GOP billionaire can fund a media outlet (like the Mercers with Breitbart) to steer public opinion or buy a judge to influence the laws, the goal is the same and the technicalities you mention do not matter.
@volkris Tesla doesn't. Maybe you're perfectly fine with powerful and rich people creating rules for the others and exempting themselves, like Thomas or Musk, and that's totally your right, but many people are getting tired of being made fools of, hence the outrage on the fediverse which seemed to puzzle you.