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,…
