i think who is doing the tax and how it’s applied matters.
it’s basically a passthrough from people to the bbc. to me, that’s not government funding. that’s a mandate yes, a tax definitely, but funding?
social security is similar in the us. yes, you have to pay it, but the government doesn’t pay for it. not a cent comes from the government budget. they don’t go into debt for it. they can’t increase or decrease the budget on a whim.
that kind of firewall creates a meaningful real world difference.
i was only using it as an example closer to home of how something can be a tax and yet not be funded by the government. ( social security is more approximately your own money coming back to you. not money paid by the government itself )
any similarity breaksdown after that because social security is managed by the government, while the bbc is not.
If it’s not voluntary- it’s a tax. If it’s a tax ; it’s subject to government control. I’m sure the BBC meets with the government regularly regarding its coverage.
The influence may not be overt - but it exists- especially on high level employees.
only musk isn’t saying it’s “funded by a licensing tax” he’s saying it’s “government funded media”.
i wouldn’t argue about most of the other european companies mentioned above because my understanding is they are funded through general taxation. their budgets come out of the government’s money.
the one he targeted is the least like what he thinks it is. ( along with npr, which also doesn’t fit the bill imo - not unless tesla, etc. also do )
( and really what he thinks it is, is government controlled. which it most definitely is not. )
eta: saw your edit. yeah, i mean, could the influence be reduced? yes, absolutely. the argument for public media is that there’s less corporate influence that way. and while i believe that whole heartedly, i definitely don’t think npr or the bbc are beyond reproach
I don’t think that’s in dispute it’s just, as others have mentioned, how much influence does that have over their journalism. BBC journalists can be like attack dogs when questioning MPs or even the higher ups of the organisation because of how much they want to be seen as impartial. But none of this nuanced discussion we’re having here is reflected in twitter’s decision to slap that label on, it’s just El Faschy playing in his faschy sandbox.
The BBC certainly is it’s own weird little undefinable category, isn’t it? I remember reading something that Douglas Adams said about it in passing back in a short 1995 essay about who the real customers of various business are:
Twitter Circle has been buggy for months, but until now, there was not substantial evidence that private Circle posts were regularly breaching containment. As TechCrunch reported two months ago, Circle tweets often show up without the green banner that indicates they’re only shared with this select audience. Still, these tweets only showed up for people in the Circle, and you could figure out that they were Circle tweets since they would not be possible to retweet. While that bug was concerning in itself, this glitch that exposes private tweets is even more dangerous.
Going private to increase engagement isn’t just for the lieutenants, anymore.
Oh, “wacky capitalists” is such a great term. There’s nothing wrong with being fun and irreverent in its place. But you can see it has taken the place of everything else…of being forward thinking, of trying to make things with any sort of gravitas or meaning, of caring about the consequences of your actions, of being understanding to other people. None of those fit with the short-sighted greed that is the defining characteristic of capitalism today.
So instead we get the fun boss who posts puerile jokes between abusing and firing anyone who disagrees with him, and you can see just how forced it all is. It’s a cruel parody of humor because none of it is actually irreverent at all, it’s all just self-worship.
Musk had control of more resources than anyone on the planet and the highest end he could think of for that is forcing people to listen to his insipid sexist jokes. It says so much about how completely hollow men like him are.
For all its faults Twitter was always good at keeping its feature set relatively streamlined and resisting the temptation to try to be 2010 Facebook. I guess that is officially over now.
Yeah, your post triggered me with just how sick of business bros I am, I was thinking of a beer company, and an airline, and what arseholes they are and the phrase struck me as appropriate. I was talking to a business journalist years ago and they were looking for some background which i wasn’t giving but I told them I had stories about the head of an airline. He just laughed and said “everyone had x stories!” And I realised that everyone laughed off his public misogyny, and I’ve heard people say his persona is just a performance to outrage people, but everyone in the know already knows he is just the same unfunny misogynistic rich little prick in private. As everyone I know who has met him has described him as just like that. The fuckers don’t even have to hide it, they just “get away” with their “non woke” “humour”.
And yes I am overdosing on the scare quotes today.
