NPR Ditches Twitter amid Ongoing Spat over ‘Government-Funded Media’ Designation

Ari Blaff
Updated ·3 min read
16

National Public Radio (NPR) has decided to quit Twitter amid an ongoing spat between the news outlet and the social-media platform over its designation as “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,” David Folkenflik, a media correspondent for the news site wrote on Wednesday morning.

The announcement coincided with a flurry of final tweets on NPR’s official Twitter account directing users to download their app, sign up for their newsletter, and follow their Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn accounts.

Last Tuesday, Twitter affixed the label “state-affiliated media” on NPR’s profile page, a designation which placed the outlet in league with Russian state-run news outlet, RT, and China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk initially tweeted approvingly of the tag. “Seems accurate,” the billionaire wrote, above an image of the social-media company’s announcement defining state-affiliated media “as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources.”

The news triggered pushback from NPR executives and prompted the outlet to clarify that it “operates independently of the U.S. government.”

“[W]hile federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources,” Bill Chappell, an NPR reporter wrote following the announcement.

“Twitter added a ‘state-affiliated media’ tag to NPR’s main account on Tuesday, applying the same label to the nonprofit media company that Twitter uses to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China,” Chappell continued.

John Lansing, the president of NPR, condemned the decision in an official statement shared on Twitter. “We are disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as ‘state-affiliated media,’ a description that, per Twitter’s own guidelines, does not apply to NPR.”

However, when NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn reached out to Musk to inform him that the website receives a small percentage of its overall funding from the federal government, Musk responded “we should fix it.”

On Monday, Twitter revised NPR’s label to “Government-funded Media” placing the latter institution alongside the likes of the BBC, PBS, and Voice of America

Still, NPR executives were unhappy. “At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” Lansing said amid the growing standoff. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

NPR is now instituting a “two-week grace period” to contemplate its future media strategy, deferring to individual employees whether or not to continue personally using the platform.

Although NPR was founded to represent “all of America,” the news outlet consistently displays a strong left-leaning political bias.

A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that the “average ideological placement” of a typical NPR consumer was more liberal than HuffPost or Buzzfeed and in line with Al Jazeera America, The Colbert Report, and New York Times. Notably, the same survey also found the average NPR reader to have  a stronger liberal bias than Fox News viewers have a conservative bias.

These findings were echoed in a 2021 study conducted by the Knight Foundation which concluded that although neither NPR nor PBS – another publicly-funded American media program – “broadcast government propaganda,” they represented “the views of a particular group – those of the politically correct elite left – whose assumptions frame public affairs programming on public broadcasting.”

PBS stated Wednesday that it will also halt its use of Twitter following the new label, according to the Associated Press.

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