Musk admits NPR isn’t state-affiliated after asking questions he could have Googled

Enlarge / NPR’s Twitter profile as of April 9, 2023.

When Elon Musk slapped NPR’s Twitter account with a “US state-affiliated media” label last week, it quickly became clear he didn’t know much about how NPR operates or how it’s funded. After admitting the state-affiliated label was wrong, Musk changed NPR’s tag yesterday to “Government Funded Media”—even though NPR gets less than 1 percent of its annual funding directly from the US government.

The state-affiliated tag took NPR and many others by surprise, in part because it contradicted Twitter’s own policy that cited NPR and the BBC as examples of state-financed media organizations that retain editorial independence. Twitter has historically applied its state-affiliated tag to state-controlled news organizations like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua.

Twitter changed its policy to remove the reference to editorial independence at NPR and the BBC but didn’t scrub the old language from another Twitter help page that still describes both NPR and the BBC as editorially independent. The BBC’s main Twitter account is also newly labeled as “Government Funded Media” after previously having no label.