The MSM hates Elon Musk and the fact that Twitter is no longer their plaything.

Musk used to be a darling of the Elite because, of course, he is a genius whose talents have done more to help electric cars become both relatively practical and cool. Before Tesla electric cars were, to put it bluntly, a pathetic joke. Now all the cool kids want a Tesla.

But Elon Musk first annoyed then enraged the Left by making what used to be an anodyne point, but is now a forbidden one: free speech is a value that needs protection, and efforts to censor opinions are themselves tyrannical. Even worse, Musk said nice things about Republicans.

So when Twitter was purchased by Musk the Left had a temper tantrum, with many hard lefties either bailing from the platform (usually briefly) or complaining bitterly about it.

When Musk poked NPR and other state-funded media outlets in the eye by labeling them “government-funded,” they went nuts. The State Department’s propaganda outlet–actually RUN by the US government–complained that Musk revealed this well-known fact.

National Public Radio quit the platform in a huff, complaining that stating a fact about the outlet was misleading (of course it is) and was denigrating to the integrity of its reporters.

Sure, NPR is state funded. But it is rather rude to point this fact out!

NPR is stepping away from Twitter, and this includes this NPR Politics feed. Please read the thread to find other ways to find our work, including:

NPR Politics Instagram: https://t.co/UJ2HzXYsR0
NPR Politics newsletter: https://t.co/mrWXwUrXrn https://t.co/5kmu5kGogV

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) April 12, 2023

So the media outlet left Twitter, and unsurprisingly so did 7 million trips to NPR’s website, which is about 5% of its traffic.

Now most visits are “organic”–people actually typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark–and obviously those visits weren’t halted by NPR’s move.

But traffic that came from social media? Those numbers crashed. Facebook and Twitter are now the public square when people look for news, and NPR cut itself out of that part of the public forum by leaving in a huff.

NEWS: NPR’s web traffic continues to fall after leaving Twitter pic.twitter.com/ZVKkWFeDP3

— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) June 12, 2023

n April, NPR CEO John Lansing justified his decision to stop posting on Twitter by suggesting it would be a “disservice” to his employees to share their 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,” he added, noting that he “would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

According to NPR’s website, it is a “private, nonprofit company with editorial independence” that “receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

I wrote a piece a while back about how NPR is spreading misinformation regarding how much money it gets from the government. It actually is hard to tell, but the real number is between 10% and 15%. For a news organization complaining that its integrity is being questioned, it would be nice if it were honest about where it gets its money.

In any case, NPR’s website traffic woes are a good indication that Twitter is still alive and well as a platform, although I suspect its finances could be better. It is no less indispensable than before Elon took over.

Good.