US Twitter labels NPR's account as 'state-affiliated media', which is untrue - US state-affiliated media mad about being called “US state-affiliated media”

April 5, 2023 · 12:55 PM ET
By Bill Chappell

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk acknowledged a change in NPR's status on the social media platform he owns that now designates the news outlet as "state-affiliated media."
Screenshot by NPR


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.

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.

Noting the millions of listeners who support and rely upon NPR for "independent, fact-based journalism," NPR CEO John Lansing stated, "NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."

NPR officials have asked Twitter to remove the label. They initially assumed it was applied by mistake, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara said. "We were not warned. It happened quite suddenly last night," Lara said.

In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks.

'Seems accurate,' Musk says of state-affiliated label​

Twitter's owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has acknowledged the new tag was applied to NPR. Responding to a tweet about the shift, Musk posted an image of a screenshot showing Twitter's policy defining state-affiliated media, with a short message: "Seems accurate."

Twitter's policy describes state-affiliated media 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."

As recently as Tuesday, Twitter's policy page stated explicitly that NPR would not be included in this label — before the wording was altered to remove NPR.

"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," the document said.

That language echoes an explanation that Twitter gave in 2020, when it announced the state-affiliated media label. At least one page on the Twitter site still listed NPR as an exception as of late morning Wednesday.

More than 99% of NPR's funds do not come from federal sources​

NPR is an independent, non-profit media organization that gets the bulk of its direct financial support from two sources: sponsorships and fees paid by hundreds of member stations, as its website states.

NPR receives federal funds indirectly because they play a vital role in supporting member stations through annual grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But those stations also rely on audience donations and other revenue — and they purchase programs and content from across the public media ecosystem, not solely from NPR.

A very limited portion of NPR's budget comes from direct federal sources. "On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments," according to NPR's website.

Critics cite erosion of Twitter's relationship with news outlets​

The abrupt appearance of the same label affixed to known propaganda outlets such as Russia's Tass and China's People's Daily set off a range of reactions, from praise to outrage. Critics of the move saw it as another sign of Twitter's troubled relationship with the media, which has deteriorated since billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter last year.

Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist who studies disinformation at the University of Maryland, warned that Twitter's move could muddy the water in a news environment where it's already difficult to decipher which outlets are reliable and have editorial independence.

"This is ridiculous and only helps actual propaganda outlets blend in with legitimate news outlets," she said via Twitter.

Twitter has also repeatedly said it will remake its landscape of verified and trusted accounts, as part of its push to get users to pay to have blue checkmarks on the platform. Experts have warned the initiative would give new status to misinformation peddlers — and concerns deepened earlier this month, when Twitter revoked the verified check mark on The New York Times' account.

As of Wednesday morning, Twitter had not applied the "state-affiliated" label to other outlets that directly or indirectly receive any public funds, such as PBS.

Source (Archive)
 
They always play this same deceitful shell game and it really proves their guilt if you ask me.

It's true that NPR gets next to no money DIRECTLY from the federal government, but it gets a massive portion of its income, from **local NPR affiliates**, who get their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is wholly funded by an annual appropriation from Congress.

The actual station you listen to is an NPR affiliate, funded by the government via the CPB, which pays NPR for its content. So yes, NPR receives a huge portion of its money from the federal government. It just gets it indirectly. Without government funding, there is no NPR.

Just about all funding at large is secured from somewhere else. The donations, fees, and gifts are just icing on the cake -so the begging is extra awful when you realize that. From NPR themselves:

View attachment 4987781

There you go. That 31% would be money from local NPR affiliate stations, and I'd be willing to bet several of those other categories (other revenue, PRSS contract, distribution, etc.) amount to public funding as well.
 
Just from looking at those Twitter banners and seeing the fucking Corporate Memphis art-style so popular with western mega-establishments including governing bodies, tell me again with a straight face that NPR isn't "state-affiliated." They're practically conjoined at the hip.
someone tell the soyjack party, that banner needs an update

i'm finally realizing that soyjacks may be the retaliation against corporate memphis ....
 
Just about all funding at large is secured from somewhere else. The donations, fees, and gifts are just icing on the cake -so the begging is extra awful when you realize that. From NPR themselves:

View attachment 4987781
when private corporations do this kind of financial obfuscation, it's just called "a network of shell companies" and it's usually a sign of tax fraud or money laundering or other corruption
but when ~nonprofits~ do it with public funds then it's all fine and dandy, nothing to see here, move along :^)
 
In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks.

Musk may be an unfunny faggot but sometimes he hits that broken clock moment with atomic force
 
I used to really like NPR and it makes me sad to see it like this.

But around the George W Bush era, it all went to shit. Something in that dopey little Texan was like a prototype-Trump effect. His mere existence drove people on the left collectively insane and made them drop all masks of civility.

In their frothing rage, they weaponized Academics and the Media, the two things NPR was made of.


Pretty much overnight the historical and scientific stuff I'd listen to was gone, replaced with "Cultural, Humanities, and Global Awareness" content. Literal garbage.

A series on The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire was replaced with a series on The Plight of Black America. Famous Battles of History replaced with puff pieces on various 3rd world refugee groups. TED Talks on Deep Sea Mining were replaced with TED Talks on Diversity in the Workplace.

And any political discussions turned from reasonably rational debates to "Biased interviewers/moderators softball questions to guests they like while dogpiling and mocking their opponents".

NPR is dead. Let it rot.
 
I used to really like NPR and it makes me sad to see it like this.

But around the George W Bush era, it all went to shit. Something in that dopey little Texan was like a prototype-Trump effect. His mere existence drove people on the left collectively insane and made them drop all masks of civility.

In their frothing rage, they weaponized Academics and the Media, the two things NPR was made of.


Pretty much overnight the historical and scientific stuff I'd listen to was gone, replaced with "Cultural, Humanities, and Global Awareness" content. Literal garbage.

A series on The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire was replaced with a series on The Plight of Black America. Famous Battles of History replaced with puff pieces on various 3rd world refugee groups. TED Talks on Deep Sea Mining were replaced with TED Talks on Diversity in the Workplace.

And any political discussions turned from reasonably rational debates to "Biased interviewers/moderators softball questions to guests they like while dogpiling and mocking their opponents".

NPR is dead. Let it rot.
Oddly, that was about the time The History Channel stopped showing shows about history.
 
There's this store close to my house that has a really bad selection, really bad prices, the workers scream at me and call me a faggot and a nigger-lover every time I walk in.

Everyone tells me to just not go there, say there's no point esp cause I also own my own store 200 feet away, but I'm thinking that keeping on going + suing them is the best option for my mental health.
 
I used to really like NPR and it makes me sad to see it like this.

But around the George W Bush era, it all went to shit. Something in that dopey little Texan was like a prototype-Trump effect. His mere existence drove people on the left collectively insane and made them drop all masks of civility.

In their frothing rage, they weaponized Academics and the Media, the two things NPR was made of.


Pretty much overnight the historical and scientific stuff I'd listen to was gone, replaced with "Cultural, Humanities, and Global Awareness" content. Literal garbage.

A series on The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire was replaced with a series on The Plight of Black America. Famous Battles of History replaced with puff pieces on various 3rd world refugee groups. TED Talks on Deep Sea Mining were replaced with TED Talks on Diversity in the Workplace.

And any political discussions turned from reasonably rational debates to "Biased interviewers/moderators softball questions to guests they like while dogpiling and mocking their opponents".

NPR is dead. Let it rot.

I didn't notice how bad they'd become until 2015 or so, and they REALLY went off the rails in 2016. I remember tuning in the morning after the Trump was elected and hearing them talk about where people could find grief counselors. I seriously thought it was some unusually edgy satire for milquetoast old NPR until they'd interviewed several sobbing, student morons, one of whom talked seriously about how her fellow Latinos were going to be "exterminated".

Since then I've heard them describe everything from laws against theft to hot weather as things that "disproportionately affect women and people of color", and celebrate the election of some city official as, I'm not kidding, "only the seventh woman of color to occupy the post".

NPR has become something worse than a joke.
 
I didn't notice how bad they'd become until 2015 or so, and they REALLY went off the rails in 2016. I remember tuning in the morning after the Trump was elected and hearing them talk about where people could find grief counselors. I seriously thought it was some unusually edgy satire for milquetoast old NPR until they'd interviewed several sobbing, student morons, one of whom talked seriously about how her fellow Latinos were going to be "exterminated".

Since then I've heard them describe everything from laws against theft to hot weather as things that "disproportionately affect women and people of color", and celebrate the election of some city official as, I'm not kidding, "only the seventh woman of color to occupy the post".

NPR has become something worse than a joke.
When Trump was elected, they conspicuously pulled ALL of their advertisements that called their programs "Unbiased teporting", "The no-spin zone", "Covering both sides of the issues", ect.

It all became "Delivering the Facts", "Bringing you the stories you need to hear", and "Telling you what you need to know".

Someone called in and asked about that during one of their programs and their response was literally "Trump is too dangerous for us to be unbiased. We're reporting whatever we can to make people see that"
 
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