On July 4th of this year, NPR tweeted out the Declaration of Independence, taking its on-air tradition of 29 years into the Twitterverse. But the public radio’s line by line recounting of one of the country’s most famous documents on the nation’s birthday did not go over well.
Many Trump supporters were outraged, thinking that NPR is tweeting some insidious revolutionary tweets to undermine the President. They didn’t quite get the content and intent of NPR’s civic exercise.Some were incensed and wanted to defund NPR, something Trump already tried to do in his budget:
Others were just thinking the 113 tweets by NPR and the ensuing notifications were either an evidence of hacking or that the venerable radio institution has become quite spammy.
The reactions got worse when the tweets relayed how displeased the colonists were with the King George III of Great Britain. Statements like “a Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people” really stood out to people, some of whom assumed NPR was calling for a revolution.
From NPR’s standpoint, they were not trying to cause any controversy or make partisan political statements. The tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on the air goes back almost 30 years and involved two dozen of the radio’s staff. They wanted to extend the practice to Twitter in order to reach a new audience.
“This year we mirrored that tradition on Twitter as a way to extend to social media what we do on the air,” wrote NRP spokeswoman Isabel Lara in an email statement to the Washington Post. “The tweets were shared by thousands of people and generated a lively conversation.
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Some people eventually figured out what NPR was up to and deleted their upset tweets. But while the online outrage was short-lived, it points to the revolutionary nature of the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, and the ideas behind it. They are still able to provoke people 241…
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