By Matthew Holloway. Media: DC Enquirer.
Note: This article may contain commentary reflecting the author’s opinion.
After being labeled first ‘state-affiliated media’ by Twitter and later amended to ‘Government-funded Media,’ by the platform, National Public Radio or NPR made the decision to surrender the ideological battlefield and abandon Twitter. The outlet which is funded by the U.S. Federal Government and multiple left-leaning corporations announced the move Wednesday saying it would be “stepping away” from Twitter.
The outlet tweeted, “NPR is stepping away from Twitter, and this includes this NPR Politics feed. Please read the thread to find other ways to find our work,”
NPR is stepping away from Twitter, and this includes this NPR Politics feed. Please read the thread to find other ways to find our work, including:
NPR Politics Instagram: https://t.co/UJ2HzXYsR0
NPR Politics newsletter: https://t.co/mrWXwUrXrn https://t.co/5kmu5kGogV— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) April 12, 2023
NPR suspended its use of Twitter after the platform added the label, “state-affiliated media,” and then later updated it to “government-funded media.” But the damage to the outlets’ proverbial ego seems to have been done.
NPR CEO John Lansing claimed it would be a “disservice” to keep the outlet’s reporting “on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards …I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility,” according to The Post Millennial.
However, this comment presupposes the theory that the outlet had some credibility, to begin with. With approximately half of Americans polled, this simply isn’t true.
According to a Pew study in 2019, only 12% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered NPR to be their main source of political news. The outlet itself reported in 2012 that 47% of Americans polled found its coverage wasn’t “believable.” In 2011 Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.
“Thirty-seven percent of Democrats say they believe most or all of what they hear on NPR, compared with 29 percent of independents and 16 percent of Republicans. That is a Democrat vs. Republican gap of 21 points, up from two years earlier.”
Lansing added, “At this point, I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
As reported previously by DC Enquirer, NPR is the federally funded, leftwing biased broadcaster of the United States that has long been considered by many since its 1970 inception under President Lyndon Johnson to be D.C.’s answer to Russian Pravda, China’s Xinhua, or most charitably the UK’s BBC.
As Kody Cava opined for Current Affairs in 2020, “NPR has become a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power.”
Adding that the network “is mostly paid for by corporations and a small percentage of its listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals.”
Notably, the BBC was assigned the same designation of “government-funded media,” Xinhua is labeled as “China state-affiliated media,” and RT, a spiritual successor to Soviet Pravda is labeled “Russia state-affiliated media.”