When Elon Musk slammed NPR’s Twitter account with a “US state-affiliated media” label last week, it quickly became clear that he didn’t know much about how NPR works or how it’s funded. After admitting the state-affiliated label was wrong, Musk changed NPR label yesterday to “Government Funded Media” — even though NPR gets less than 1 percent of its annual funding directly from the U.S. government.
The state-affiliated tag surprised NPR and many others, in part because it contradicted Twitter’s own policy citing NPR and the BBC as examples of state-funded media organizations maintaining editorial independence. Twitter has traditionally applied its state-affiliated tag to state-controlled news organizations such as Russia’s RT and that of China Xinhua.
Twitter changed its policy to remove the reference to editorial independence at NPR and the BBC, but did not scrap 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 has also been newly labeled “government-funded media” after previously having no label.
In emails with NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, Musk asked basic questions that he could have found answers to with a quick Internet search. “He didn’t seem to understand the difference between public media and state-controlled media,” Allyn said in an interview with Mary Louise Kelly on the show on Friday. All together.
Allyn continued:
He asked me at one point, quote, “what is the breakdown of NPR’s annual funding?” And he asked, “who appoints the lead at NPR?” These are questions you can get by Googling, but for some reason he wanted to ask me. And let’s also dwell on these questions, Mary Louise, because he made a major policy decision, right? And having done this, he is only now asking for the basic facts. This is not exactly how most CEOs in America operate. Anyway, I answered his questions. About 1 percent of NPR’s budget comes from federal grants, and an independent board appoints NPR’s CEO, who elects leadership.
Musk: label “maybe not right”
Musk could have gotten the NPR funding information from this NPR page, which states, “On average, less than 1 percent of NPR’s annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB. [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and federal agencies and departments.”
Corporate sponsorship is the largest contributor to NPR funding, accounting for 39 percent of average annual revenue between 2018 and 2022. NPR receives an additional 31 percent of its funding in programming fees from member organizations. Federal funding indirectly contributes to the latter category because the publicly funded CPB provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.
Musk’s emails were further elaborated in an article by Allyn. After Allyn told Musk that NPR only gets 1 percent of its money from the government, Musk replied, “Well, then we have to fix it.”
“The operating principle with the new Twitter is just fair and equal treatment, so if we label non-U.S. accounts as government, then we should do the same for the U.S., but it sounds like that might not be right here,” Musk wrote in a statement. another email to Allyn.
NPR’s current government-funded label links to Twitter’s policywhich includes Twitter’s definition of state-affiliated media accounts, but does not define government-funded.
