The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has stopped tweeting from its primary Twitter account after being labeled as “government-funded media.” As of this writing, the @PBS account hasn’t tweeted since April 8th, and the organization has confirmed that it currently has “no plans” to resume posting on Twitter.
The impact of the label
“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps told Bloomberg. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.” While PBS isn’t tweeting from its main account, it has continued to put out content on affiliated accounts like @NewsHour, which have not had the “government-funded” label applied.
PBS’s decision follows a similar move made by National Public Radio (NPR), which officially announced it would be leaving Twitter after being labeled as government-funded. Twitter initially labeled NPR as “US state-affiliated media,” using terminology usually reserved for state-backed outlets that aren’t editorially independent, like RT or China’s Xinhua News. It later changed the label to “government-funded media.”
Defending editorial independence
“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” NPR CEO John Lansing said in a memo to staff.
Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, who has had a long antagonistic relationship with the media, has doubled down on the decision to apply the labels to US public broadcasters. Musk tweeted that NPR should lose funding and accused them of hypocrisy for supporting both independence and government support. In a series of tweets, Musk called for NPR to be defunded and criticized the organization for promoting both editorial independence and federal funding.
{{user}} {{datetime}}
{{text}}