Defund NPR.
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) April 12, 2023
This storyline was the wrong kind of stupid for our coverage until Jim Jordan, tweeting under the account of the majority side of the committee he chairs, stepped into the ring. In a vacuum a Republican calling for NPR to be defunded is about as noteworthy as them saying they want to lower taxes or allow industrial concerns to pollute the environment. On Wednesday however, it’s obvious that Jordan is now saying this in direct response to NPR’s announcement they would stop using the platform, which in turn was a response to Elon Musk’s shitbrained move last week labelling them as “State-funded media,” a pre-Musk marker originally intended to make Twitter users aware that information was coming from authoritarian regimes in Beijing, Moscow, Riyadh, et cetera. Now Jordan wants that marker removed – along with the very tiny fraction of NPR’s operating budget that comes from the federal government – because, for now at least, they’re exercising their right to not post links to their news on a platform owned by a third of Jordan’s Holy Trinity.