On Wednesday, NPR said it will discontinue using Twitter due to its association with the United States government.
NPR has made the decision to cease updating its 52 “official” Twitter channels, almost six months after Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter.
“NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be on Twitter,” an NPR spokeswoman said in a statement. This is due to Twitter’s actions, which give readers the mistaken impression that we are not editorially independent, harming our credibility.
“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have shown they want to hurt our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” the statement said.
When Twitter labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media” last week, the news outlet was not happy. NPR was categorized with other state-run media outlets from other countries, such as Russia’s TASS and China’s Xinhua News. After that, NPR stopped posting links to its articles. Despite the fact that Congress established a legislation making NPR feasible, Twitter used to single it out as an outlier in the United States due to its “editorial independence.”
The White House was among those who stepped in to help NPR. NPR’s “independence” has been lauded by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who also noted that NPR journalists “work hard to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.”
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is among those who don’t like NPR who have claimed they prefer the new format.
After a reporter from National Public Radio (NPR) pointed out that the government contributes to around one percent of NPR’s annual operating budget, Musk acknowledged that the new designation might not be appropriate. According to an email from Musk, “the operating principle at the new Twitter is just fair and equal treatment.” “If we label non-US accounts as govt, we should do the same for US,” the author writes, but “it sounds like that might not be the case here.”
Twitter eventually rebranded NPR as “Government-funded Media.” The BBC uses the same label.
On Wednesday, NPR’s main Twitter account, which has 8.8 million followers, went up, but only to announce that the network “produces important, independent journalism every day in service to the public” and to list the other social media sites where it will continue to publish.
It has been reported that NPR CEO John Lansing has stated that while individual NPR workers would be free to continue tweeting, the organization as a whole would not immediately return to Twitter if the name were changed. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t trust Twitter’s choices,” Lansing remarked. As example, “It would take me some time to figure out if I can trust Twitter again.”