State-affiliated media is defined 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.
NPR describes itself as “an independent, non-profit media organization,” with most of its funding coming from “corporate sponsorships and fees paid by NPR Member organizations.” Federal funding indirectly contributes to a large chunk of NPR’s revenue because the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.
Twitter’s “state-affiliated media” tag has an impact on how many people see an account’s tweets. “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people,” the company policy says.
Musk’s feud with media
The NPR labeling occurred days after Twitter revoked The New York Times’ verification badge over the paper stating publicly that it won’t pay Twitter’s new $1,000-per-month charge for businesses. The NYT lost verification even though the badge hasn’t yet been pulled from other accounts that don’t pay due to a grace period that Musk said would last a few weeks “unless they tell [us] they won’t pay now.” Musk 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.”
Musk may have similar thoughts about NPR. Yesterday afternoon, he replied with an exclamation point to a tweet criticizing NPR for describing European right-wing politicians as “lobbing a conspiracy theory that elites want people to eat bugs.”
Another tweet in the thread, though not the tweet that Musk responded to, said that “NPR thinks people don’t like eating bugs because we are racist colonizers” and that “NPR is worse than the propaganda of Maoist schoolchildren during the cultural revolution.”
Update at 1:43 pm ET: NPR published an article calling the state-affiliated media label untrue. “NPR operates independently of the US government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1 percent of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources,” the article said.
An NPR spokesperson was quoted as saying that Twitter made the change without notifying NPR. “We were not warned. It happened quite suddenly last night,” a spokesperson said. NPR CEO John Lansing called it “unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”