Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media,” in the style of outlets in Russia and China. Despite protest from NPR bosses, the designation is fully accurate and deserves application to other government media funded by American taxpayers.

In an article headlined “Twitter labels NPR’s account as ‘state-affiliated media,’ which is untrue,” NPR’s Bill Chappell claimed, “NPR operates independently of the U.S. government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”

NPR CEO John Lansing also weighed in. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable,” Lansing claimed. “It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”

That brought a quick response from Twitter users, who found no NPR stories about the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, currently the most powerful man in the world.

“We don’t waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” NPR claimed at the time, “and we don’t want to waste our listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

As readers might recall, the New York Post broke the story of the Biden laptop in October 2020.

Twitter banned the story from the Post’s own Twitter account. Then–Twitter boss Jack Dorsey later claimed the censorship was a “total mistake.”

Now under CEO Elon Musk, Twitter is totally right that NPR is a government mouthpiece. So is the Public Broadcasting Service, as the government-funded PBS recently demonstrated with an American Masters episode on Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s recently retired health adviser and a person of considerable interest.

Born in 1940, Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine it was only for a short time. In 1968, to avoid treating wounded GIs in military hospitals, Fauci took a cushy “yellow beret” job with the National Institutes of Health. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, but in 1984 the NIH made Fauci director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Back in the 1990s, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), said Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”

Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the general population never came to pass. His favored treatment for AIDS was AZT (azidothymidine) a highly toxic DNA chain terminator sold as Zidovudine. In The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy documents how Fauci’s NIAID conducted dangerous drug trials on foster children in New York City, most of them black or Hispanic.

NIAID ethics officer Dr. Jonathan Fishbein learned that Fauci had a financial interest in the drugs being tested. When Dr. Fishbein flagged ethical violations in the drug tests, Fauci fired him.

“Dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime,” Fishbein told RFK Jr. “He’s like the godfather. He has connections everywhere. He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way—that he gets what he wants. These connections give him the ultimate power to fix everything, control every narrative, escape all consequence, and sweep all the dirt and all the bodies under the carpet and to terrorize and destroy anyone who crosses him.”

Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is chief of the National Institutes of Health bioethics department. The official NIH announcement did not disclose that Grady is Fauci’s wife, a huge conflict of interest. The NIH ethics chief has not disclosed whether any of the human subjects would have held back from drug trials if they knew her husband got a piece of the action.

In The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, published in 1995, Grady also concealed her relationship with Fauci, whom she married in 1985. Grady contended that children and pregnant women were suitable subjects for drug trials and touted “the availability and effectiveness of AZT.” As the federal power couple had to know, it was anything but.

Fauci controls public health policy and federal spending on medical research, a dangerous concentration of power. In the throes of the pandemic, the scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration sought an end to destructive lockdowns, particularly on schools. Instead of debating the scientists, Fauci collaborated with NIH boss Francis Collins on a “quick and devastating published takedown.”

As the NIH explains, gain-of-function research makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. Fauci funded that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is controlled by China’s Communist regime. When Sen. Rand Paul called him out, Fauci claimed “I represent science,” and charged that his critics were attacking science itself.

Fauci maintains that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild. The FBI and Energy Department now find evidence of a laboratory origin. That was evident from the beginning for scientists such as Dr. Richard Ebright, a chemical biology professor at Rutgers, who flagged the Wuhan lab as the most likely source.

Fauci would seem to merit an investigation by the PBS Frontline series. Instead, PBS serves up a hagiographical treatment of this Lysenko figure who has been in government for more than 50 years without ever facing the voters. When Joe Biden joked that Fauci was the real president, the Delaware Democrat was not far off the mark.

Elon Musk was right that NPR is a government mouthpiece. The Twitter boss should now turn his attention to PBS, which gets 15 percent of its budget from the federal government. A ballpark figure for what PBS and NPR should get from American taxpayers is zero. Fully independent media are essential for the health of our democracy.