Publicly Funded PBS Joins NPR In Abandoning Twitter As Elon Musk Laughs

On Thursday, PBS or the Public Broadcasting Service joined NPR in cutting ties with Twitter after both outlets were tagged as government-funded media by the social media giant under Elon Musk.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time. We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely,” a PBS spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

As previously reported by the DC Enquirer, NPR CEO John Lansing claimed it would be a “disservice” to keep the outlet’s reporting “on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards …I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

Despite these complaints, however, NPR lists on its own website that government funding is essential to its operations:

“Federal 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.

Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that make up an important part of a diverse revenue mix that includes listener support, corporate sponsorship, and grants. Stations, in turn, draw on this mix of public and privately sourced revenue to pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming.”

In response to the news, Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote, “Publicly funded PBS joins publicly funded NPR in leaving Twitter in a huff after being labeled ‘Publicly Funded'” 

Publicly funded PBS joins publicly funded NPR in leaving Twitter in a huff after being labeled “Publicly Funded” 🤣

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2023

NPR ‘GOVERNMENT-FUNDED MEDIA’ ABANDONS TWITTER AFTER BEING ACCURATELY LABELED

Earlier in the week Musk wrote, “NPR literally said ‘Federal funding is essential to public radio’ on their own website (now taken down). What hypocrites!”

NPR literally said “Federal funding is essential to public radio” on their own website (now taken down).

What hypocrites! pic.twitter.com/kYAXW0zpyl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 12, 2023

“Of the $319 million Bill Gates gave to media outlets by November 2021, NPR received $24,663,000 and PBS got at least $4 million,” wrote Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. “In return, those ‘public interest’ broadcasters aired flattering reports on Gates’s corrupt self-dealing and profiteering on his global vaccine projects and his hostile takeover of WHO.”

“Gates’s climate strategy is top-down social control and geoengineering projects for which he owns the IP,” he explained. “While shorting Tesla, he has invested heavily in fossil fuels, rail, private jet companies and chemical pesticides, and petroleum-based AG. He accurately characterizes his approach as ‘philanthrocapitalism’-a strategy of amplifying his billions by appearing to solve social problems with technologies that he controls and profits from.”

As previously reported by the DC Enquirer, according to a Pew study in 2019, only 12% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered NPR to be their main source of political news. The outlet itself reported in 2012 that 47% of Americans polled found its coverage wasn’t “believable.”

It would appear that PBS is attempting to stand with NPR due to the accurate labeling of the two outlets. 

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