National Public Radio (NPR) is firing back at Twitter for now labeling its official account as "US state-affiliated media."
"NPR stands for freedom of speech & holding the powerful accountable," NPR CEO John Lansing tweeted Wednesday. "A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy. My full statement on the recent inaccurate Twitter label below:"
"We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as 'state-affiliated media,' a description that, per Twitter's own guidelines, does not apply to NPR.
"NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide. NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way."
Twitter's label links to a Help Center page outlining "How state-affiliated media accounts are defined":
"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. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled.
"State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
Notably, Twitter removed NPR from that policy Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, whose company has issued troves of evidence of collusion with the government and the past Twitter regime, issued a two-word response to quoting just the first sentence of the new policy at Twitter.
"Seems accurate," Musk wrote early Wednesday morning.
On the facts, Lansing was a political appointee by former President Barack Obama.
Fox News lawyer and reporter Gregg Re rejected Lansing's claim of independence as erroneous, noting it not only served as state-run media in blocking the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, but actual deep state affiliated media as the Twitter Files have revealed, showing how the blocking "true" reporting of the laptop in October of 2020 meddling in the election. (This was during the Trump administration and polls have noted how anti-Trump media and operatives blocking the Hunter Biden laptop story in the days before the 2020 election helped turn out votes for Joe Biden to unseat then-President Donald Trump.)
"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," NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuels said in October 2020.
The Hunter Biden laptop story has since been corroborated and the Twitter Files have outed it as election meddling.
"(Terence Samuels is still at NPR btw, but taking a sabbatical to give seminars on disinformation. No sh**)," Re added in a subsequent Tweet.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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