NPR has announced that they will no longer be posting and maintaining any of their 52 Twitter feeds after Twitter boss Elon Musk falsely labeled them ‘state-affiliated 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.
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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
funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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NPR is not state or government-funded media. NPR and PBS are a frequent targets for Republicans and conservatives and the move by Musk appears to be his latest effort to court the far-right in the hope that they will prop up his money-hemorrhaging social media company.
Twitter users are waiting for Musk to apply whatever standard that he used for NPR to Fox News, which has been exposed as not a news organization, but a political operation that serves the Republican Party.
NPR is doing the right thing to protect its integrity and credibility. Twitter is the nation’s biggest news aggregator. If news organizations follow NPR and leave Twitter, the platform will be well on its way to irrelevance and collapse.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
