My buddy Brendan doesn’t own a television, but he’s always sending me notes about the latest editorial decision on National Public Radio that he finds outrageous. Since he approaches things from a left-wing point of view, you can imagine that he doesn’t see NPR as some partisan liberal news outlet, but rather one that bends over backwards to give “both sides” of issues. Perhaps they succeed in angering both sides better than they do at fairly representing them. I don’t know, because I almost never tune in. I am aware, however, the right-wing is suspicious of all publicly-funded media. It’s the same in the United Kingdom where the BBC is a regular punching bag of the Tories.

One thing I didn’t know until Elon Musk decided to “label” NPR twitter accounts as “state-affiliated media” was just how little government funding NPR receives.

The news organization says [it] is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting…

…Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

After Musk was criticized for treating NPR like a Russian or Chinese propaganda outfit, he tried to compromise by replacing the “state-affiliated media” designation with a “government-funded media” one. That was at least technically accurate, although pretty misleading if intended to warn readers about their independence. Any organization that is afraid of losing one percent of their funding is about to go out of business anyway. NPR might be more concerned about their affiliate stations losing funding, but they have no real control over that.

In any case, NPR’s board is independently appointed, and they’ve decided to take the organization completely off Twitter to avoid participating in their own reputation’s damage.

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…

…NPR is instituting a “two-week grace period” so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.

In an email to staff explaining the decision, [NPR CEO John] Lansing wrote, “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.”

This whole saga shows how deeply unserious Musk is as a public thinker. This is only reinforced by reading his recent interview with the BBC.

Former Twitter executive Bruce Daisley – who ran the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for eight years – said the interview “gave us some insight into the strange life of this billionaire”.

“He confessed today that the only reason he went through with buying Twitter was because he believed a judge would force him to go through with the transaction. He’s never admitted that till now, so it was a very whimsical interview.”

Fame and fortune makes a lot of people insane. I’m thinking about Elon Musk, but also entertainers like Kanye West, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson. In any case, NPR has seen enough and they’re taking their ball to other social media outlets.