MRC Cheers Musk’s Arbitrary Re-Labeling Of NPR’s Twitter Account

When last we checked, the Media Research Center was getting irritated with Elon Musk’s Twitter for doing the thing that the MRC’s year of Musk-fluffing was designed to do: keep it and its fellow right-wingers from being held accountable for posting offensive content. Musk knew he had to distract from that growing critical narrative, and it was with what has usually worked: tossing out right-wing red meat. Joseph Vazquez eagerly took Musk’s bait for an April 5 post under the hateful headline “GET WRECKED”:

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.”

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.

The MRC raged hard at that money going to public broadcasting, hyperbolically suggesting that this relatively tiny amount in a $2 trillion bill was killing people (and, by extention, arguing that public broadcasting employeees should die instead). Of course, Vazquez did not mention that his employer got its own share of this largesse, receiving as much as $2 million in pandemic relief money.

Given that Vazquez is also the MRC’s designated George Soros-hater, it’s unsurprising that he took a tangent into Soros derangement:

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 iberal billionaire funding has been nothing short of nutty.

Vazquez didn’t mention which “nutty” billionaires (cough*Mercer*cough) have influence over his own content.

When NPR pointed out that Musk’s new label violated Twitter’s own definition of “state-affiliated media” and that the government does not dictate NPR’s content, Vazquez raged in an update: “if a news outlet is getting funding from the government, it’s not ‘free press.'”

The next day, Curtis Houck cheered that a former Fox News personality (though not identified as such) reinforced Musk’s anti-NPR narrative:

Wednesday night on NewsNation, On Balance host Leland Vittert battled woefully unprepared liberal strategi Tuesday night with a “US state-affiliated media” label with Vittert noting it does, in fact, derive part of its budget from the U.S. government. 

Shroff hilariously denounced the label, but unintentionally proved the label’s accuracy by proclaiming countries are better off with a state-run outlet to compete against everyone else.

When Musk adjusted his label on NPR to make it “government funded media,” Luis Cornelio lamented it as a defeat in an April 10 post:

Twitter owner Elon Musk appeared to cave to leftist pressure and switched  NPR’s “state-affiliated media” account label for the more euphemistic “government funded media.”

The move came days after NPR and left-wing allies decried Musk’s designation of NPR’s Twitter account as “state-affiliated,” a label used for outlets that vomit government-run propaganda. While NPR is not directly run by the government, the media outlet has routinely positioned itself as a mouthpiece for leftist causes and Democratic politicians, including the Biden administration.

[…]

“The label change is little more than a distinction without a difference,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “One thing remains clear: NPR does the bidding of the left, including protecting leftist policy prescriptions and federal politicians, many of whom it relies on to receive grant money.”

Cornelio repeated earlier whining that “Democrats funneled $75 million through the coronavirus stimulus bill in 2020 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the purpose of supporting NPR and PBS stations” without disclosing that the MRC also got government money or that Donald Trump, a Republican, signed off on all that funding.