It’s not. NPR gets its revenues from member stations that buy the rights to the content.
It takes some government grants to support certain reporting and special projects but it doesn’t, directly, need government support for operations.
It’s member stations may take more government funding (I’ve seen numbers up to 10% but much of that is usually state funding not federal) - which it then uses to buy programming from NPR but that’s an arms length transaction.
By far the vast amount of public radio funds come from donations. You could remove all government funding and it would only really affect smaller, rural stations - the ones that mostly need governmental support.
A lot of people want to accuse NPR of having a liberal bias because of its governmental funding. Bias is hard to argue objectivelybut if you want to make the case that NPR is biased based on funding it would be more apt to say that it’s because most of their funding likely comes directly from its liberal leaning listeners.
PBS which is a similar organization for TV takes a slightly higher amount of government funding but that’s a similar setup.
... this is literally just a condensed version of the comment you just replied to, which happens to go into greater detail than your link, and does a far better job of explaining it from a nuanced perspective. I'm sure that that broad description you linked to helps you feel that it supports your argument, but once you dig down into that nuance, it really doesn't.
So if I work for Walmart and donate to planned parenthood does that mean that Walmart supports planned parenthood?
I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make here? Is it that NPR is biased because it takes some marginal amount of governmental funding? Is it “state-sponsored media”? Or are you just arguing the numbers?
It takes some government grants to support certain reporting and special projects but it doesn’t, directly, need government support for operations.
It’s member stations may take more government funding (I’ve seen numbers up to 10% but much of that is usually state funding not federal) - which it then uses to buy programming from NPR but that’s an arms length transaction.
By far the vast amount of public radio funds come from donations. You could remove all government funding and it would only really affect smaller, rural stations - the ones that mostly need governmental support.
A lot of people want to accuse NPR of having a liberal bias because of its governmental funding. Bias is hard to argue objectivelybut if you want to make the case that NPR is biased based on funding it would be more apt to say that it’s because most of their funding likely comes directly from its liberal leaning listeners.
PBS which is a similar organization for TV takes a slightly higher amount of government funding but that’s a similar setup.