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National Public Radio was founded in the 1960s and has been taking public money for its entire existence. But today the organization announced it was quitting Twitter because it’s tweets were being labeled “government-funded media.”
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.
Twitter then revised its label on NPR’s account to “government-funded media.” The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting…
“The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said in an interview. “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”
The label “state-affiliated media” was a mistake. That label usually implies a “news” outlet that is effectively run by a nation as propaganda, such as Russia’s RT network. Government-funded media is closer though NPR is not as government-funded as it used to be. This is from Wikipedia:
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of NPR funding came from the federal government.
