Twitter Shifts NPR Label to ‘Government Funded Media’ amid Standoff

After initially labeling National Public Radio (NPR) “state-affiliated media” in a tag that appears on the outlet’s profile, Twitter shifted the designation to “Government Funded Media” on Monday.

Although the social-media company moved away from its earlier designation, which placed NPR alongside the Russian state-run news outlet, RT, and China’s Xinhua News Agency, the new label now places the institution alongside the likes of the BBC, PBS, and Voice of America.

“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,” Bill Chappell, an NPR reporter wrote following the announcement last week.

“NPR operates independently of the U.S. government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”

John Lansing, the president of NPR, also 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.”

Twitter executive Elon Musk initially tweeted approvingly of the identification. “Seems accurate,” the billionaire wrote, sharing 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.”

NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn emailed Musk informing him that the website only receives roughly 1 percent of its funding from the federal government, prompting Musk to respond “we should fix it.”

According to NPR, roughly 40 percent of operational funding derives from corporate sponsorships and nearly a third from fees “paid by local public radio stations.” The media outlet has publicized a list of its largest donors which include several automotive manufacturers such as BMW, Ford, General Motors, and Honda.

While 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 survey found that the average NPR consumer has a stronger liberal bias than Fox News consumers have a conservative bias.

These findings were echoed in a 2021 study conducted by the Knight Foundation which concluded that although neither NPR nor Public Broadcasting Service (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.”

NPR has yet to use the social-media platform since Twitter’s initial decision to brand them “state-affiliated media.”

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