PBS Joins NPR In Backing Away From Twitter

After National Public Radio (NPR) quit Twitter, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) became the second news organization to do so this week. This was in response to Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, listing NPR as “US state-affiliated media” and then later labeling it as “Government-funded Media,” a designation that was also applied to PBS.

PBS spokesman Jason Phelps informed Bloomberg News that “PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time.” He added, “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

Musk shared Twitter’s policy on labeling state-affiliated media and when making the initial decision to label NPR. The Twitter policy states that “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

In response to the labeling, an NPR spokesperson announced that the company would no longer use the platform. The statement said that “NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.” The statement further explained that NPR was not “putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” and that there were alternative ways to stay connected to NPR’s news, music, and cultural content.

This decision by NPR comes amidst controversy over the organization’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the weeks preceding the 2020 presidential election. NPR Managing Editor Terence Samuels explained NPR’s stance by remarking, “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.”

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