The Non-Relational Freedom of State-Financial Media, The NPR, Twitter, and the Poop Idol
State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, will not be labeled. The stance was reflected in the policy page of the micro-blogging site.
“State-affiliated media” are outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content directly through funding, or indirectly through political pressure, according to the guidelines.
NPR is independent of the US government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.
The CEO of NPR stated that the NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable, noting that millions of theNPR’slisteners support and rely uponNPR for independent, fact based journalism. It is not right for them to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”
NPR asked the social network to remove the label. Isabel Lara said they initially thought it was applied by mistake. We weren’t warned. It happened quite suddenly last night,” Lara said.
In response to an NPR email that was seeking comment and requesting detail about what led to the new designation, the company’s press account forwarded a poop icon to journalists for weeks.
The independence of NPR journalists is “very dangerous” and “very bad” for the news community, and the government’s influence on the news landscape
Jean-Pierre said there was no doubt about the independence of NPR journalists. “If you’ve dealt with their questions before, you know this.”
Roth has previously said he left Twitter because he saw the platform being undermined by “capricious decision-making.” In this instance, he sees something more pernicious.
“Establishing a false equivalency between public broadcasters and editorial control of media by government is misleading,” he said, “and undermines the essential work of providing transparency about state-backed propaganda efforts around the world.”
Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist who studies disinformation at the University of Maryland, warned that Twitter’s move could muddy the water in a news environment where it’s already difficult to decipher which outlets are reliable and have editorial independence.
Twitter has also repeatedly said it will remake its landscape of verified and trusted accounts, as part of its push to get users to pay to have blue checkmarks on the platform. Experts have warned the initiative would give new status to misinformation peddlers — and concerns deepened earlier this month, when Twitter revoked the verified check mark on The New York Times’ account.
In a second email, Musk admitted that it might not be the case, and compared NPR to media outlets controlled by other countries.
“Well, then we should fix it,” Musk wrote in an email on Wednesday, when he was told that the government support was 1% of NPR’s finances.
But the label given to NPR was no laughing matter to free press watchers who viewed it as “a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources,” the literary organization PEN America said in a statement.
The People’s Daily in China, and Sputnik and RT in Russia, for instance, received the labels, but outlets with editorial autonomy that received some government funding did not.
“We decided to call out state connections that had a track record of influencing news reporting in the way we did it, as the most fair and balanced way to implement labels at the time,” he said.
That meant that NPR, the government-funded outlet Voice of America, “and even Al Jazeera didn’t quality under our designation,” the former employee said.
“That matters a lot if you see an outlet like, have never heard of it, and it appears to be a legit news source,” the former executive said about the state news agency that pushes the official line.
Under Twitter’s rules, and according to the former executive, accounts that have been given the state-affiliated mark are not recommended or amplified on the platform — a process known as “downranking” among social media insiders.