Elon Musk's Twitter has provoked a spasm of media outrage by adding the works "state-affiliated media" to tweets coming from the main account of the indisputably federally funded radio network.

To be sure, financially beleaguered NPR receives lots of non-governmental funding, including donations from individuals and corporate advertising underwriting, but the organization misleadingly claims that "less than one percent" of its budged comes from the federal government in the form of grants.  While this may be true, NPR charges its local affiliates, which receive federal, state, and even local funding in some instances, for the programming it provides so that state funding is, in effect, laundered through these local stations.

NPR is very unhappy about this label.  Its CEO, John Lansing, protested vigorously on Twitter:

NPR stands for freedom of speech & holding the powerful accountable. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.
My full statement on the recent inaccurate Twitter label below: pic.twitter.com/kdusUNtNUo

— John Lansing (@johnlansing) April 5, 2023

Corporate media and Google joined in the campaign to discredit the label.

Source.

The key area of dispute is Twitter's own definition of the term:

Twitter states on its website 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."

But as of Wednesday afternoon, Twitter's Help Center continued to explicitly specify that NPR should not fall under that designation.

"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy," it said.

Other accounts run by NPR, such as its music and politics handles, did not have the "state-affiliated" specification as of Wednesday afternoon.

Much though I despise the leftist bias and dishonesty of NPR, the problem with the network is not that the federal government dictates its coverage.  That most certainly was not true during the Trump and Reagan administrations.  But there is what might be called a "deeper truth" that the network's editorial staff is of one mind with the left-wing establishment that controls the permanent bureaucracy in the federal government.

To my mind, the most egregious and telling incident about NPR's bias (which just happened to coincide with the wishes of the Biden Regime) was its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, other than to claim that it was the product of Russian intelligence, only to be forced to issue a humiliating correction.  The haughty attitude was exemplified by its claim:

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.

"Distractions" is such an interesting term, for it implies a goal that is the paramount storyline to be pushed.

As far as I am concerned, Twitter might as well change the designation to "state-funded" media, which is hard to dispute.