After Earning ‘State-Affiliated Media’ Label On Twitter, NPR Leaves For Chinese State-Affiliated TikTok
After being correctly labeled as “US state-affiliated media” by Twitter, National Public Radio (NPR) announced on Wednesday its plans to forgo using the social media platform to post its slanted, left-wing “news” coverage. Instead, the company will promote its content on other social media sites such as TikTok, a popular app that effectively operates as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spyware.
“NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform,” the outlet announced in a Wednesday morning article, citing Twitter’s inclusion of a “US state-affiliated media” tag in the organization’s account bio as the reason for the decision. By then, Twitter had updated NPR’s tag to read “Government-funded Media” following a total meltdown by Twitter’s left-wing, blue-check brigade.
In typical, melodramatic fashion, NPR CEO John Lansing claimed he has “lost … faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” and that he needs to take “some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
“It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards,” Lansing wrote in an email sent to NPR staff.
Not long after NPR announced its departure from Twitter, the government-funded outlet posted a series of tweets linking to resources its readers can use to find NPR content. One of these tweets contains a list of NPR’s other social media accounts, including a link to NPR’s official TikTok account.
Owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, TikTok has rightly come under fire in recent months for its connections to the Chinese Communist Party. Included in TikTok’s privacy policy is a provision stipulating that the platform “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information … such as faceprints and voiceprints,” from users’ content. In China, companies such as ByteDance are required by law to give the CCP access to any data it requests.
[READ: 3 Biggest Revelations From The TikTok Hearing That Explain Why The App Has Got To Go]
While Twitter certainly has its problems — such as continued shadowbanning of conservative figures and censoring of factual reporting — its decision to label NPR as “state-affiliated media” or “government-funded media” isn’t inaccurate. In fact, NPR even admits as much in the article announcing its departure from Twitter.
In Wednesday morning’s diatribe, NPR claimed Twitter’s labeling of the outlet as “government-funded media” is “inaccurate and misleading.” Yet, in the very next sentence, NPR concedes that “it receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
If the government funding provided to NPR is as small and insignificant as the outlet claims, then why accept it at all? Moreover, if the outlet is so concerned about being accurately labeled as “government-funded media,” then wouldn’t the easiest solution be to reject what supposedly small amount of funding it receives from federal bureaucrats?
In light of NPR’s histrionics, it’s worth highlighting the fact that the so-called “news” outlet has operated as a Democrat Party mouthpiece for years. After the New York Post released its infamous Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, for instance, NPR outright refused to cover the bombshell revelations, claiming it didn’t “want to waste [its] time on stories that are not really stories.” The outlet also referred to the story as a “pure distraction.”
For additional examples demonstrating NPR’s left-wing bias and journalistic incompetence, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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