NPR: State-Affiliated Media?
6th April 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
Twitter has designated National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media.”
Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media” on the social media site, a move some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization.
We can only hope so.
NPR said it was disturbed to see the description added to all of the tweets that it sends out, with John Lansing, its president and CEO, calling it “unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way.”
It was unclear why Twitter made the move. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”
“Seems accurate,” Musk tweeted in a reply to NPR.
These days, NPR gets only a minor percentage of its funding from the federal government. But it gets much more from its state affiliates, which themselves are largely financed by the federal and state governments.