NPR is quitting Twitter, saying that the social network owned and run by Elon Musk is "undermining our credibility." The decision was made about a week after Musk branded NPR with the "state-affiliated media" tag, which is typically applied to propaganda outlets controlled by governments.
"NPR's organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent," NPR said in a statement provided to Ars today. "We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public's understanding of our editorial independence."
In what's apparently a final series of tweets, NPR posted a thread listing the various non-Twitter methods of accessing NPR content. "We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content," NPR's statement said.
The state-affiliated label was heavily criticized, with many people and groups pointing out that NPR is editorially independent. "Twitter has inexplicably added a warning to NPR's Twitter account, labeling the venerated news outlet as state-sponsored media, on par with Russia Today and other mouthpieces for authoritarian regimes," PEN America said.
Musk eventually admitted NPR isn't state-affiliated after asking questions that he could have answered himself with a Google search. As NPR reporter Bobby Allyn said Friday, "He asked me at one point, quote, 'What's the breakdown of NPR's annual funding?' And he asked, 'Who appoints leadership at NPR?' These are questions you can get by Googling, but for some reason he wanted to ask me."
After being told that NPR gets only 1 percent of its money from the government, Musk replied to Allyn, "Well, then we should fix it." But instead of returning NPR to its previous unlabeled status, he changed the label from "US state-affiliated media" to "Government-funded Media."
State-affiliated label contradicted Twitter’s policy
Musk's decision to label NPR as state-affiliated contradicted Twitter's own policy, which said that "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy." Twitter deleted that line from its policy but wasn't very thorough, as the language is still on this help page that describes government and state-affiliated media account labels.
NPR's website explains, "On average, less than 1 percent of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and federal agencies and departments."
As we've previously noted, corporate sponsorships accounted for 39 percent of NPR's average annual revenue between 2018 and 2022. NPR says it gets another 31 percent of its funding in programming fees from member organizations. Federal funding indirectly contributes to the latter category because the CPB provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.
Musk's labeling of NPR seems to be part of his feud with the media, but he's been more direct in lashing out against The New York Times. When Twitter revoked the NYT's verification over the paper's decision not to pay a $1,000-per-month fee, Musk called the NYT "hypocritical" because "they are super aggressive about forcing everyone to pay their subscription." He also wrote, "The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn't even interesting," and "their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable."
The BBC was never labeled state-affiliated by Musk but now has the same government-funded tag as NPR's account. The BBC, which continues to be active on Twitter and conducted a Twitter Spaces interview with Musk yesterday, says it is primarily funded by the UK's compulsory TV license fee.
NPR CEO unsure if Twitter can ever be “trusted again”
"I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility," NPR CEO John Lansing was quoted as saying in an NPR article.
Musk suggested in the BBC interview yesterday that he might change the label to "publicly funded," but Lansing said NPR wouldn't immediately return to Twitter even if Musk dropped the label entirely. "At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he said. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."
NPR has 52 official Twitter feeds and is instituting a "two-week grace period" for staff who run the Twitter accounts to revise their social-media strategies, the NPR article said. "Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter," NPR wrote.
Lansing wrote an email to staff that said, "It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards."
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