The social media platform Twitter labeled National Public Radio (NPR) as state-affiliated media on its website late Tuesday night, putting the non-profit media conglomerate in the same category as government-operated propaganda like Russia Today and China's Xinhua News Agency.
However, in doing so, Twitter appeared to ignore outlets that are actually funded by the United States government—like military newspaper Stars & Stripes and public broadcast station Voice of America (VOA)—calling into question whether Twitter's decision was motivated by the bias of the company's conservative owner, Elon Musk.
On Wednesday morning, many Twitter users began to notice tweets from NPR's official account bearing labels identifying them as state-affiliated media, suggesting the outlet's content was directly guided and influenced by officials in the U.S. government.
The change in policy appeared to contradict Twitter's own policies in characterizing outlets as state-affiliated media.
While NPR was established by an act of Congress and does receive some federal funding in the form of grants, its funding is primarily derived from member fees as well as listener donations. And unlike outlets like VOA—which was once used to push anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War—NPR has complete editorial independence, a distinction Twitter noted in its own guidelines prior to this week's shift in policy.
"Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled," the policy said. "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."
NPR Chief Communications Officer Isabel Lara told Newsweek on Wednesday that NPR believed the change in their label was a "mistake," and that the company contacted Twitter to have the label removed as it contradicted the guidelines. Hours after the change, however, the reference to NPR had been stripped from the website's policy without explanation, while the BBC remained.
Newsweek reached out to Musk on Twitter for comment. A request for comment emailed to Twitter's office on the rationale behind the policy change was answered with a poop emoji—an automatic reply used by the company after Musk laid off his company's communications staff.
As news of the change began to spread, some journalists on Twitter noted that only a minuscule share of NPR's funding comes from federal grants.
According to a breakdown of the outlet's funding streams on NPR's website, about 39 percent of its funding is derived from corporate sponsorships, while an additional 43 percent comes from a mix of programming fees and direct contributions from listeners. Voice of America, meanwhile, derives its funding exclusively from Congress, while the military newspaper Stars & Stripes draws a small share of funding directly from the budget of the Department of Defense.
A number of other outlets that receive funding from the U.S. government—including Radio Free Europe and four other publicly funded media outlets overseen by the federally funded United States Agency for Global Media—also escaped the state-affiliated media label under Twitter's previous regime, even though they were directly subject to government interference in their editorial strategy.
During the Trump administration, for example, the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate voted to appoint conservative filmmaker Michael Pack to lead the agency, resulting in a purge of senior leadership and a tangible lurch to the right in each of the outlet's editorial positions in a move critics claimed undermined their missions to provide independent journalism in places around the world where it might not exist.
Marius Dragomir, founding director of the Media and Journalism Research Center—which monitors state media around the world—said he was "surprised" by Musk's decision to label NPR as state-affiliated media, noting that the outlet fails to match the criteria shared by other outlets in the center's State Media Matrix.
"In my view, you can't put on the same level state-controlled media with independent public media simply because in the latter you don't have any form of state control," Dragomir told Newsweek. "To label the latter as state-influenced, state-controlled or state-affiliated is quite misleading and dishonest."
Some on Musk's platform highlighted another potential reason for the NPR label: the recent decision by the organization's top leadership not to cover any live remarks by former President Donald Trump, including a speech he made to supporters after his Tuesday arraignment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 charges of falsifying business records in an alleged hush money payment scheme involving former adult film star Stormy Daniels.
After Musk's decision to remove a "verified" label from the New York Times after it publicly declared it would not pay for his subscription service, some read the move to label NPR a propaganda outlet as retribution against an outlet he didn't like.
"NPR is not state-affiliated media. It is public media," Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a former NPR host now at the New York Times, wrote in a tweet blasting Musk's policy shift. "The NYT is not propaganda. It is the most robust news organization in the English speaking world. The bias as to who is being targeted on this site by its leadership is so very clear. And it's not a small thing."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more
