Please ignore the $465M that NPR affiliated stations received from Federal government.
See also https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance... where NPR makes the opposite argument, namely, that "Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
That $465M number is how much government grant money goes to the group “stations who are paying NPR member fees”. The two obvious questions are 1. how much is that as a fraction of the total income of the group “stations who are paying NPR member fees”, and 2. how much of NPR’s revenue is from member fees. Searching around, the first is variously quoted as 6%, 11.4%, or 16%, while second seems to be consistently quoted as about 50%. So the loose bounds on indirect Federal funding for NPR are “more than 3% and less than 16%” - not a very compelling fraction, but not insignificant, so therefore it’s a wash.
In any case, Federal funding is just one clause of the “state controlled media” qualification and the argument for or against NPR receiving this status largely rests on the other clause that is concerned with state editorial control. This is a more subjective question and one that Elon (and thus Twitter) appears to have answered in the affirmative.
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Please ignore the $465M that NPR affiliated stations received from Federal government.
See also https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance... where NPR makes the opposite argument, namely, that "Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
That $465M number is how much government grant money goes to the group “stations who are paying NPR member fees”. The two obvious questions are 1. how much is that as a fraction of the total income of the group “stations who are paying NPR member fees”, and 2. how much of NPR’s revenue is from member fees. Searching around, the first is variously quoted as 6%, 11.4%, or 16%, while second seems to be consistently quoted as about 50%. So the loose bounds on indirect Federal funding for NPR are “more than 3% and less than 16%” - not a very compelling fraction, but not insignificant, so therefore it’s a wash.
In any case, Federal funding is just one clause of the “state controlled media” qualification and the argument for or against NPR receiving this status largely rests on the other clause that is concerned with state editorial control. This is a more subjective question and one that Elon (and thus Twitter) appears to have answered in the affirmative.