UPDATE, 12:55 p.m. Eastern: NPR CEO John Lansing released a statement railing at Twitter for labeling his organization "state-affiliated media." "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," Lansing whined.
But here was the kicker: "NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable," er, by taking taxpayer money from the powerful? He continued: "It is unnacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy." Newsflash Lansing: if a news outlet is getting funding from the government, it's not "free press."
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Elon Musk’s Twitter finally confirmed what the Media Research Center has been saying for years: National Public Radio is nothing but state propaganda.
Twitter slapped a “state-affiliated media” label on NPR’s account. Musk responded to conservative personality Benny Johnson celebrating that Twitter tore off NPR’s fake veneer of objective journalism. “Seems accurate,” Musk tweeted. MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider took a blowtorch to NPR following the news.
“NPR is not just state media. It is a mouthpiece of the Deep State,” he said. “It has worked to deceive American taxpayers about its real role, but it’s so obvious that it really is just a state-sponsored tool for the left to silence half of Americans and create propaganda for the other half.”
Seems accurate pic.twitter.com/nx5TmJY7GX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2023
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats inserted $75 million in the coronavirus stimulus bill earmarked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to maintain NPR and PBS stations. This was on top of the $465 million already granted to the CPB (itself an increase of $20 million in annual funding). NPR even proclaimed on its website how “[f]ederal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”
One look at how NPR historically covered the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates why it’s a rubber-stamp for false government and deep state narratives. In 2020, NPR correspondent Joel Rose called the Wuhan lab leak theory one of the “biggest conspiracy theories” about the COVID-19 virus. He likened the legitimate theory to QAnon. A now-deleted NPR tweet claimed the lab-leak theory was “baseless” and that there was “zero evidence for this.” NPR headlined an April 22, 2020 story: “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence.” In March 2020, NPR brought on a pro-Biden disease expert to suggest that “we’re all gonna drop dead” under President Donald Trump’s leadership.
But NPR doesn’t just receive tax funding. It is also financed by some of the most notorious liberal billionaire activists in American politics, including Bill Gates and George Soros. MRC Business recently released a study on leftist billionaire Soros and his enormous influence over world media, including NPR.
Soros funds NPR directly, meaning that a Soros-funded organization also happens to simultaneously be a prominent news outlet. His direct funding of NPR gives him influence over NPR’s entire legion of at least 1,800 journalists and 400 reporters and editors in over 200 member stations across the country. The leftist content that NPR has been spewing as a result of both its state-funding and liberal billionaire funding has been nothing short of nutty.
NPR hailed in March 2023 how “[l]ocal reparations programs – in about a dozen cities and the state of California – have renewed hopes for an eventual national policy to compensate for slavery.”
NPR also tried to claim recently in a now-deleted tweet that there was “limited scientific evidence” that biological males have an advantage over women at sports.
NPR once scolded people who use dinosaur emojis to communicate on the internet because they supposedly belonged to “trans” people. A “transgender” NPR guest named Riley Black mourned how dino emojis were being hijacked from the LGTBQ-plus community during a June 10, 2022 segment. “No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly gender queer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs [Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists] kept dropping the emoji into their feeds,” said WBUR podcast host Amory Sivertson.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representative in Congress and demand they #DefundNPR.
