The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Twitter profile has a new label that Elon Musk wrote especially for Canada’s public broadcaster: “69% government-funded media.” While Musk appears to be enjoying his feud with media outlets, his insistence on using “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” labels for public broadcasters has prompted several news organizations to shut down the social network he bought for $44 billion. .
“Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they are ‘less than 70% government funded,’ so we corrected the label,” Musk wrote in a statement. tweet last night. The tweet included a screenshot of CBC’s Twitter profile with the new label “69% government-funded media”.
The “69% government-funded” label, while clearly a joke, seems inaccurate. The CBC may not have told Musk the exact percentage, but the organization’s publicly available financial report for 2022 says it received $1.24 billion in government funding and an additional $651.4 million in revenue from advertising, subscription fees and investments. . That would mean government allocations accounted for about 66 percent of the CBC’s funding and revenue in 2022.
Another screenshot posted by Musk suggests he briefly labeled the CBC as “70% government-funded media” before changing it to 69 percent. Musk apparently took the 70 percent figure from one inaccurate tweet posted by an account called “TitterDaily.” TitterDaily claimed to pull data from “CBC’s 2021-2022 Annual Report,” but instead posted a screenshot of CBC’s 2020-2021 Annual Report and miscalculated the percentage from the older report’s numbers.
Musk replied to TitterDaily last night, writing, “I’m just trying to be accurate. Would they be okay with us saying 70% is government funded?” He then posted a screenshot of the 70 percent label and wrote, “Their concern has been allayed.” Musk applied the 69 percent label less than an hour later.
Conservative leader asked Musk to label CBC
Musk previously labeled CBC as government-funded media on Sunday without showing a percentage. Musk assigned the label to Canadian conservative leader Pierre Poilièvre asked Twitter to do so, who claimed it was necessary to “protect Canadians from disinformation and manipulation by the state media”. After Musk obeyed, Poilièvre tweeted“Now people know it’s Trudeau propaganda, not news.”
The CBC on Sunday challenged the government-funded label, to write:
Twitter’s own policy defines government-funded media as cases where the government “may have varying degrees of government involvement in editorial content,” which is clearly not the case with CBC/Radio-Canada. CBC/Radio-Canada is funded by the government through a parliamentary appropriation voted on by all MPs. Editorial independence is legally protected in the Broadcasting Act… In addition, our journalism is independent and subject to our Journalistic Standards and Practices, as well as an independent complaints process.
A CBC spokesperson issued a statement saying the news organization will “suspend our activity on our corporate Twitter account and all CBC and Radio-Canada news-related accounts” because the government-funded label “destroys the accuracy and professionalism of the undermining work done”. by CBC journalists. The CBC also reportedly sent a letter to Twitter asking the company to remove the label.
Musk previously called NPR Twitter’s “state-affiliated media” tag, which is typically applied to propaganda outlets controlled by governments, despite NPR getting less than 1 percent of its funding directly from the U.S. government. Musk’s decision to designate NPR as state-affiliated contradicted Twitter’s own policy at the time, which stated, “For example, state-funded media organizations with editorial independence, such as the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this Policy.”
