BREAKING: NPR Rage Quits Twitter After Platform Correctly Labels The Outlet ‘State-Funded Media’

National Public Radio – an American taxpayer-funded news media ‘nonprofit’ – is officially calling it quits on Twitter after the social media platform aptly labeled the outlet as “state-affiliated media,” putting NPR in the same basket as Russia’s RT and China’s Global Times.

In an article published Wednesday morning, NPR reporter David Folkenflik explained why the decision was made:

The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.

Twitter then revised its label on NPR’s account to “government-funded media.” The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading.

According to Folkenflik, NPR CEO John Lansing is aiming to save face as the network is exposed on the platform for receiving millions in taxpayer funding, no matter the downsides of staying off of Twitter:

By going silent on Twitter, NPR’s chief executive says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”

“The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said in an interview. “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

NPR’s new state-funded media tag and its abrupt, angry exit from the platform represent just a few more stumbles in a long saga of embarrassment on Twitter.

The outlet has been shamed repeatedly for its shoddy and lazy reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the 2020 Election. In a snarky 2020 tweet – which aged very poorly – NPR told its followers why the state-funded entity wasn’t covering the Hunter story at all.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” wrote Terence Samuel, NPR’s then-managing editor, who has somehow received multiple promotions since the disastrous newsletter deployed in October 2020.

Here is a screenshot of the tweet: