The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.

This came more or less directly from our NPR station in DC as they talked about fund raising in their many, many drives. And this wasn't for the station itself, I believe this was for NPR, since they then went on to talk about how many stations, mostly in rural areas, had a funding inverse of that.

Basically, if you are listening to NPR outside a major population center, then its almost certainly because Federal dollars make that possible. And if you listen and contribute to a major station, then you are one of the few that pay the 90% or so of the budget for the content on NPR.

You’re conflating the local NPR affiliate with the news company and radio content aggregator. It like you’re saying that my local NBC station is owned by NBC News, when it’s locally owned (well, in my case owned by a company with a lot of stations, but not NBC itself).

Less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes directly from the government itself through competitive grants, etc.

Some of the budget comes from member stations (presumably more than 1%) who themselves receive some level of state or federal funding. Those are the entities that receive ~10% of their budgets from a government of one kind or another (the rest coming from donations or other non-profit funding). But those stations can get content from a variety of other public radio sources. I believe NPR can (did?) handle some of the distribution of non-NPR content via their satellite services.

Originally NPR was directly funded by the CPB to a much greater extent. However that changed substantially in the 80s when the stations themselves started receiving funding from the CPB instead of NPR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

> The numbers I am last aware of, while ten years old now, were that Federal funding was roughly 10% of their operating budget, with 90% coming from other sources.

If that's accurate, then I'd love for NPR to explain the order of magnitude gap between their claim of 1% and that 10% figure. That's a huge difference.

to upon_drumhead: Federal funding laundered through sub-orgs that share the same "NPR" branding is still federal funding.

Member station funding is different then the actual NPR organization funding.

Member stations paying NPR is the bulk of NPRs funding.

From the article:

>Most of NPR's funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

Also, here's NPR's report on financing: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance.... It also includes breakdowns of member station financing. 8% average from CPB, 5% from other government sources.

NPR is one of several providers to individual public radio stations. The government supports those individual stations; they use some of that support to purchase programs from NPR, American Public Media, PRX, etc.

If you look at the breakdown lower in the page, 31% of NPR's revenue comes from member station licensing fees and of the member station funding 13% comes from government sources, so in total that would be 4%.