Musk admits NPR is not affiliated with the state after asking questions he could have Googled

Expand / NPR's Twitter profile as of April 9, 2023.

When Elon Musk slapped NPR's Twitter account with a tag "media affiliated with the US state" last week, it quickly became clear he didn't know much about the operation of NPR or how it's funded. After admitting the state-affiliated label was wrong, Musk yesterday changed NPR's label to "Government Funded Media," even though NPR receives less than 1% 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-funded media organizations which retain their editorial independence. Twitter has always applied its state affiliation tag to state-controlled news outlets, such as RT in Russia and Xinhua in China.

Twitter changed its policy to remove reference to editorial independence from NPR and the BBC, but did not erase old language from another Twitter help page that still describes both NPR and the BBC as editorially independent. The BBC's main Twitter account is also newly tagged as "Government Funded Media" after having had no label before.

In emails with NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, Musk asked some basic questions 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 Friday in an interview with Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered. p>

Allyn continued:

He asked me at one point, in quotes, "what is NPR's annual funding breakdown?" And he asked, "who appoints the leadership of NPR?" These are questions you can get by googling, but for some reason he wanted to ask me. And also, let's take a moment and dwell on these questions, Mary Louise, because he made a major political decision, didn't he? And after that, he now asks for the basic facts. That's not exactly how most CEOs in America operate. Anyway, I answered his questions. About 1% of NPR's budget comes from federal grants, and an independent board appoints NPR's CEO, who selects leadership.

Musk: "may not be accurate" label

Musk could have obtained NPR's funding information from this NPR page, which states, "On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes from grants from the CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting ] and federal agencies and departments."

Corporate sponsorships are the largest contributor to NPR's funding, accounting for 39% of average annual revenue between 2018 and 2022. NPR receives an additional 31% of its funding in programming fees from member organizations. Federal funding contributes indirectly to the latter category, as the publicly funded CPB provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.

Musk's emails were detailed in an article by Allyn. After Allyn told Musk that NPR only gets 1% of its money from the government, Musk replied, "Well, we should fix that."

"The operating principle of the new Twitter is simply fair and equal treatment, so if we label non-US accounts as government, we should do the same for the US, but it seems that's not accurate here," Musk wrote in another email to Allyn.

NPR's current government-funded label is tied to Twitter's policy, which includes Twitter's definition of state-affiliated media accounts, but does not provide a definition of government-funded. Ex-Twitter exec explains pre-Musk labeling

Allyn's article cites a former Twitter executive who helped...