Twitter has added this designation to the profile of National Public Radio:
“‘US state-affiliated media.’”
The presumed aid to Twitter users in evaluating NPR’s content also appears, as of midday Wednesday, on each and every one of NPR’s tweets. It is also inaccurate.
Unlike the state organs around the world that might be called to mind by the new label — Pravda, Sputnik, TASS, RT or Xinhua, for example — NPR is editorially independent of the executive, or any other, branch of the U.S. government and operates under the same management and in the same fashion regardless of the party identification of the current presidential administration.
Nor is NPR as dependent on the government as is, for example, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, funded by Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media alongside Voice of America and other organizations, or the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which operates — with editorial independence — from within the Defense Department. (The Twitter profiles of RFE/RL, VOA, and Stars and Stripes include, as of Wednesday, no Twitter-supplied labeling.)
NPR, a nonprofit entity, is funded largely by fees from member stations and corporate sponsorships. It receives less than 1% of its budget from the federal government, according to the nonpartisan Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch.
The president and CEO of NPR, John Lansing, issued a statement Wednesday observing that the Twitter labeling had occurred the previous day and was, based on Twitter’s own help-page explanation (which specified that NPR, like the BBC in the U.K., were not to be designated state affiliates because of their editorial independence), inaccurate.
That statement of policy was, as NPR correspondent David Gura observed, revised within hours such that Twitter’s newly imposed NPR label is no longer so starkly at odds with stated policy.
While Twitter has appeared to operate in a more mercurial manner under Elon Musk’s management — it was just 48 hours ago that the dogecoin mascot suddenly appeared in prominent placements across Twitter — the “why” of the “state-affiliated media” decision was not publicly disclosed.
Some onlookers drew a straight line between NPR’s stated approach to coverage of Tuesday’s arraignment in Manhattan of Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, and the imposition of Twitter’s labeling:
NPR offered this pulled-back-curtain look at its editorial-decision-making process as it related to Trump — and, notably, its noncoverage of his post-arraignment speech from his home and membership club in Palm Beach, Fla.:
NPR was not, it’s worth noting, the lone major U.S. public broadcaster drawing ire from the political right — if that’s where Musk presently positions himself — over its editorial approach to the week’s Trump news:
This post was originally published on Market Watch
