The National Public Radio media service hit back at Twitter Inc. today after the social media platform made the surprise move of labeling it as state-affiliated media.

NPR, which is headquartered in Washington D.C., has more than 1,000 public radio stations in the U.S. It was established as an act of Congress and does get some of its budget from the federal government, but only about 1%. NPR has always said that it operates as an independent entity, certainly not as a government mouthpiece.

Now NPR has been tarred with the same brush as China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s RT, Russia Today. The former, according to Reporter’s Without Borders is the “world’s biggest propaganda agency,” while the latter has spent much of its existence denying it’s a mouthpiece for the Russian government. The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, has also faced criticism that it serves up regular doses of bias.

It’s a murky area and one that may deserve some attention, but to be labeled as state media should require a certain amount of evidence. The BBC, by the way, isn’t labeled state-affiliated media on Twitter. So why did NPR suddenly become tainted by such a designation?

In the past, Twitter outlined the reason the BBC and NPR did not receive this label, saying they were “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence.” It seems Twitter just removed this reference to NPR, but not the BBC — which receives 70% of its funding through public licensing fees. Does that mean some new evidence has emerged? It seems not, so it’s not easy right now to ascertain what wind took Twitter to make it change its stance.

“We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as ‘state-affiliated media,’” NPR Chief Executive John Lansing said just after it happened. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way.”

In an article published by NPR today, the service said executives first believed Twitter had made a mistake. “We were not warned,” a spokesperson said. “It happened quite suddenly last night.”

press@twitter.com now auto responds with 💩

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2023

When NPR asked for clarification from Twitter, it received a poop emoji as an answer – something that Twitter has been doing for some time now, likely inspired by the often-impish, sometimes media-unfriendly commander-in-chief, Elon Musk. The only thing Musk has said about the matter is in the form of a tweet, in which he wrote “seems accurate” above a definition of state-affiliated media. No doubt this won’t be the last word, or emoji.

Photo: James Cridland/Flickr