NPR Protests Twitter for Labeling Its Account ‘State-Affiliated Media': ‘It Is Unacceptable’
thewrap.comdecrying the label as one used “to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.””“NPR operates independently of the U.S.
government,” the nonprofit media company said in a story posting on its website. “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.”NPR officials asked Twitter to remove the label, which they said was applied with no warning.President and CEO John Lansing told ABC News it is “unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way,” noting the label appears on all of its tweets.“NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable,” Lansing said. “A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”It was not clear what prompted the move on Twitter’s part.
ABC reported that Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the platform’-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.NPR apparently deleted that exchange.
Thursday morning, its latest post was from Tuesday night, but the label appeared on all of its old stories as well. Some hosts and reporters were still tweeting.“What happens when a major social media organization becomes a vehicle of retribution by its owner?” asked longtime host Lulu Garcia Navarro in a post that showed the new label on NPR’s profile. “The underpinning of how they have been regulated is the argument that they are agnostic ‘platforms’.
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