YouTube announced Friday it will start flagging videos published by organizations that receive government funding.
Viewers will be able to see labels on videos from government-funded outlets above the video’s title on the page.
“News is an important and growing vertical for us and we want to be sure to get it right, helping to grow news and support news publishers on YouTube in a responsible way,” YouTube News senior product manager Geoff Samek said.
“This notice on publishers receiving public or government funding, though still in its early stages, not only carries forward our work in this area through 2017, but represents one of many more steps we will take throughout 2018 to improve how we deliver news content on YouTube.”
The move comes after online tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter received backlash on Capitol Hill for their handling of Russian propaganda in the 2016 presidential election.
The social media giants have been criticized by lawmakers for not revealing the extent of Russian activity on their platform meant to influence the election.
Despite YouTube’s efforts to combat the negative use of state media, U.S. broadcaster PBS has lashed out at the move.
“Labeling PBS a ‘publicly funded broadcaster’ is both vague and misleading,” a PBS spokesman said in a statement to The Washington Post.
“PBS and its member stations receive a small percentage of funding from the federal government; the majority of funding comes from private donations. More importantly, PBS is an independent, private, not-for-profit corporation, not a state broadcaster. YouTube’s proposed labeling could wrongly imply that the government has influence over PBS content, which is prohibited by statute. If YouTube’s intent is to create clarity and better understanding, this is a step in the wrong direction.”
Via The Hill Here is the announcement in full from YouTube:
Greater transparency for users around news broadcasters
Friday, February 2, 2018
A big goal for us in 2018 is to provide greater transparency across the board to our community of creators, advertisers, and viewers. In one small step towards that commitment, today we will start rolling out notices below videos uploaded by news broadcasters that receive some level of government or public funding. Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help them better understand the sources of news content that they choose to watch on YouTube.
We’re rolling out this feature to viewers in the U.S. for now, and we don’t expect it to be perfect. Users and publishers can give us feedback through the “send feedback” form. We plan to improve and expand the feature over time.
The notice will appear below the video, but above the video’s title, and include a link to Wikipedia so viewers can learn more about the news broadcaster. (see example below)
News is an important and growing vertical for us and we want to be sure to get it right, helping to grow news and support news publishers on YouTube in a responsible way. This work follows a series of changes we made throughout 2017 to better surface authoritative news content. In 2017, we launched a “Breaking News” shelf on the home page to prominently surface news after a major event and a “Top News” shelf in YouTube search results to highlight news from authoritative sources for news-related queries.
This notice on publishers receiving public or government funding, though still in its early stages, not only carries forward our work in this area through 2017, but represents one of many more steps we will take throughout 2018 to improve how we deliver news content on YouTube.
Geoff Samek, Senior Product Manager YouTube News, recently watched “The Oxford comma’s unlikely origin.”
I find it hilarious that PBS objects to being labeled as being “funded in whole or in part by the American government”. The entity was created by an act of congress according to Wikipedia (based on the CPB financial reports):
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American privately owned non-profit corporation created in 1967 by an act of the United States Congress and funded by the federal government to promote and help support public broadcasting.
The CPB’s annual budget is composed almost entirely of an annual appropriation from Congress plus interest on those funds. 95 per cent of the corporation’s appropriation goes directly to content development, community services, and other local station and system needs.[8]
For fiscal year 2014, its appropriation was US$445.5 million, including $500,000 in interest earned. The distribution of these funds was as follows:[9]
- $222.78M for direct grants to local public television stations;
- $74.63M for television programming grants;
- $69.31M for direct grants to local public radio stations;
- $26.67M for PBS support;
- $22.84M for grants for radio programming and national program production and acquisition;
- $22.25M for CPB administrative costs;
- $7.00M for the Radio Program Fund.
Public broadcasting stations are funded by a combination of private donations from listeners and viewers, foundations and corporations. Funding for public television comes in roughly equal parts from government (at all levels) and the private sector.
PBS doesn’t seem to get the “funded in whole or in part by the American government” part. If YouTube makes an exception for their caterwauling “No fair!” then the whole YouTube labeling program will be moot.
One wonders if this labeling will extend to government funded climate propaganda. Surely things like this from PBS will be labeled on YouTube. But what about NOAA, NSIDC, and NASA GISS videos? One can only hope.
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Actually, I agree. They get some funding from the public but most comes from the taxpayer via the US government.
Back before cable and the internet there was, theoretically, a valid argument for it’s existence. Those days are long gone.
Cut off the government funding completely. There is no need for taxpayers to fund PBS anymore. Period.
Spot on!
+1
Fully agree. If they are valuable, let them earn their keep. If not, goodbye.
Even before cable, there were very few places with only one or two TV stations, and even remote areas could access a dozen or more radio stations.
True, but most of the radio stations and virtually all of the television stations systematically slant their news coverage to the Left. They are every bit as much a part of the “liberal press” as PBS and NPR, and far to the left of the American mainstream.
The only explanation I can think of for their lockstep leftist slant is that the J-Schools must be indoctrinating students with leftist propaganda, and perhaps teaching them to bias their reporting. (A plausible explanation I’ve heard is that J schools, being an “easy major,” got disproportionately packed with draft dodgers when LBJ exempted graduate students from the draft, and those people then became the next generation of leftist professors.)
http://sealevel.info/science_and_race_as_social_constructs.jpg
They are very good at what they do, and if you think you can “filter out” their bias by being aware of it you are kidding yourself. You can’t.
Here’s an example: Some years ago I took a date to a pro-life Rally and March, in Raleigh. (You can see why I’m single, can’t you?) We went early, and helped set up a pro-life memorial called the Life Tree in front of the State Legislative Building. (It is festooned with ~4000 pairs of baby booties, so it takes a lot of work to set it up.) We finished Life Tree setup early, so we watched the pro-abortion rally across the street before our Rally started. (We watched from the museum window, so we wouldn’t look like we were part of their crowd.) They had perhaps 50 people at their event; certainly less than one hundred.
It was a “round number” anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and that was the largest pro-abortion crowd I’ve ever seen at one of the these events. Even the local TV news teams were there, filming.
Later we went to the pro-life Rally and March, where there were thousands of participants. When we marchd, we filled the street from side to side for blocks.
My date had never been to one of these events before, and she was amazed at the disparity of numbers. There were probably 50x as many pro-lifers as pro-aborts.
I told her, “The news broadcasts will hide that fact. They’ll make it look like there are as many pro-abortion demonstrators as pro-lifers.”
She didn’t reply, but I could see the doubt in her face.
That evening, we watched the coverage on NBC channel 17. Sure enough, through the use of artful camera work they actually made the pro-abortion crowd look larger than the pro-life crowd. (Later a friend told me that the CBS and ABC coverage were even worse.)
My date asked, “How did you know? How did you know they would do that?”
I replied, “Because they ALWAYS do it. Every station, every year. Always.”
That’s what I mean by “liberal press.” In this case, as with jurisprudence, liberal = dishonest.
I’ll add this.
PBS has always touted it’s “educational” side via shows like “Sesame Street”. “The Muppets” became a multimillion dollar product. Yet the taxpayer still pays to air “Sesame Street”.
I stopped listening to PBS completely about 10 years ago. Aside from the constant AGW and leftist drumbeats I got really tired of some of their story formats. The one that made my hand stab for the dail was where a somewhat accented voice (British or generic euro) reporter voice would introduce the story via a put upon citizen of some asian or African region and you got 3 minutes of tedious foreign talking “translated” by a heavily accented voice. I hated that patronizing nonsense.
PBS does not go fare enough, in my opinion. The funding source for any piece that calls itself “news” should always be revealed. Whether it is the Soros Foundation or the Heritage Foundation. Whether it is the Billy Graham Ministries or the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
If you cannot evaluate the source of “news,” you cannot evaluate its veracity. Oh, you can evaluate it by the “journalist” that is “reporting” it – but nine out of ten times these days that just means you throw it into the trash bin.
Agitprop from Moscow:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42939644
People need to keep a close eye on outfits like PBS in the US and the CBC in Canada because both appear to be in the back pockets of the environmentalists. I can’t ever recall a documentary on either network that gives a balanced report on the probable and possible causes of climate change. Instead, they’re invariably the doom&gloom types that virtually guarantee hell or high water unless governments and consumers take drastic action to combat the phenomenon. Nor will they ever air anything on how unconcerned people really are about the issue as illustrated by the few steps we actually are willing to take and how few the really big polluters like China, India and Russia are taking. Both PBS and CBC are also good at downplaying the fact that the US has achieved major emissions reductions even while its fossil fuel production has increased.
PBS and NPR are both government propaganda outlets — at least — for the Democratic Party and its fellow-traveling leftist-liberal-progressives.
My local NPR station, out of Albany, NY has gotten so much into the party-line business that I have renamed it “WDNC — a public outreach of the Democratic National Committee”.
[PS: I am not a Republican — which I consider a bad thing, second only to being Democrat].
PBS… Why are taxpayers paying for more propaganda from the liberal swamp? The MSM already has that covered.
Defund PBS already. Sickens me that the counties surrounding D.C. are the wealthiest in the country, when they produce absolutely nothing of value there.
You can see where this is going. I guess I’m going have to go out and do my own interviewing and counting the dead etc. I wonder…I wonder how the labelers are going to handle the FISA stuff implicating the Obama admin’s DOJ/FBI using a dossier paid for by Hillary/DNC to surveil the Trump team to knock Trump out of the race and now out of the the Whitehouse? The media is already 80% run by the Champaign Soshulists (the Champs). They also run the politifact scam where they can check adverse facts out the back door. We’ll need an algorithm to sort this out. Maybe labelling a group of news sources as fake news by the Champs will serve to pre-filter news so I can find the “fake” news that criticizes “Progressives” (a fake term like the “Democratic” Peoples Republic of North Korea) easier.
What we need is a little analogue meter in the corner with a needle which indicates the degree to which each video is biased Left /Right. There could be the standard 90 degree meter for most stuff but we can have a 180 degree needle range to accommodate Communists/Marxists and Neo-Na3is. A special orange warning flashing light could be incorporated in the scale to deal with Flat Earthers.
With this simple system it will only be necessary for users to glance at the meter in the corner to ensure that are not being fooled or manipulated. The settings of the meters for each video will be determined by the posters themselves but they will be incentivised to get it right as commenters will be able to suggest adjust the needle as appropriate an if the amendment is too high there will be a penalty.
Oh, and a small green LED in the bottom right corner to indicate sarcasm.
Nothing angers the left more than informing the American people with the facts.
Labeling PBS a ‘publicly funded broadcaster’ is both vague and misleading, a PBS spokesman said
Fine. Then they shouldn’t mind having their taxpayer funding discontinued.
Pretty easy solution PBS. Just refuse to accept any government money are you escape the dreaded title for your you tube propaganda.
I just thought you lucky Americans. Your
PBS[PBS] costs you about half a billion dollars for a population of about 330 million. We Aussies are stuck with a public broadcaster (with a charter that requires it to be even handed and non-biased which is observed entirely in the breach!) that costs 25 million of us about $1.2 billion per year.Not only do PBS and NPR get federal tax money directly, they also get free “in-kind” grants of valuable broadcast spectrum, and tax exempt status, and access to subsidized borrowing via tax-exempt bonds.
My guess is that they also get a variety of other perquisites from State and local governments, and from their associations with public universities, etc.
“Public: (government-subsidized) broadcasting in the United States is a very, very big business. There are a lot of PBS and NPR stations:
PBS (television): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PBS_member_stations
NPR (radio): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NPR_stations
Take a look at the Form 990 for just one major PBS station, WGBH, Boston:
http://www.wgbh.org/userFiles/file/FY2016%20Form%20990.pdf
Some highlights:
* They have total assets of more than half a billion dollars, and they have net assets (that is, assets minus liabilities) of more than a third of a billion dollars. (Remember, this is just one PBS station!)
* Most of their liabilities ($171 million) are in the form of tax-exempt bonds.
* They compensate their President, Jonathan Abbott, more than $600,000 per year — which is more than the President of the United States earns.
* They spend nearly $200 million per year.
* In a single year, they paid more than a million dollars to each of four different contractors.
Don’t forget state and local government funds.
For years, when some member of the (R) party would suggest cutting the funding of PBS, there would be howls from RINOs and everyone to their left about how valuable a service it continues to be to those who are “underserved”. Now we find that billions in funding don’t mean they were government funded. This is so funny. But the joke is on us, because not only did we spend billions on PBS, the punch line is that we borrowed every penny of it and will pay the interest on the sum for the rest of our lives.
I also remember back in the early days I asked a respected climate blogger where I could go to observe this thing called Global Warming, and they said (paraphrase) “Its this squiggly line graph you are looking at.”
And I thought, “Okkkaaaaayyyyyyy…that’s a drawing”
And it only went farther downhill from there.
Andrew
I also remember back in the early days I asked a respected climate blogger where I could go to observe this thing called Global Warming, and they said (paraphrase) “Its this squiggly line graph you are looking at.”
And I thought, “Okkkaaaaayyyyyyy…that’s a drawing”
And it only went farther downhill from there.
Andrew
Labelling, of any kind, has an editorial component. In my book, it goes against free expression. I don’t have to warned about the source of content. I should be skeptical of all content, no matter the source. A free society is premised on the idea that people can make decisions. Of course, education is helpful. Critical thinking is a skill that can be learned. Who will decide which labels are important? Which organizations will be red-flagged, and why? Once the concept of labelling is accepted and introduced, where is the end of it? Democracy is messy. Free, unfiltered expression is part of that mess. Suits me.
If PBS is so upset about being labeled as receiving funds from government, then they are free to stop accepting those funds.
On the other hand, every time Republicans have tried to defund PBS, PBS and it’s supporters have gone on the warpath proclaiming that the Republicans were trying to kill PBS.
So which is it, is the government funding a small, insignificant amount? Or is government funding vital to keeping PBS going?
MarkW wrote, “…proclaiming that the Republicans were trying to kill PBS.”
Big Bird. They say the evil Republicans want to kill Big Bird. >100K google hits can’t be wrong… right?
Don’t forget state funding for PBS stations. Many millions of public funds were spent in the conversion to digital broadcast capability.
Fast forward 10 years.
Does anyone believe that with the advent of 5G gigabit wireless data the govt powered organs of Truth will even begin to be silenced? Let alone the minute-by-minute news speak, we’re talking autonomous vehicles and really, really smart toasters! Watch out for your toilet, it knows what you did and how you did it!
It should also have to state when an article is funded by any registered or significant sized lobby group. We get propaganda information by FOE and Greenpeace presented as unbiased information.