NPR gets 1% of funding directly from the government.

13% of the 31% (4%) they get from member stations comes from the government, for a total of 5%.

The "hand that feeds" NPR is mostly corporate sponsors and member stations' listeners.

39% of NPR revenue comes directly from corporations.

Another 12% comes from foundations (the wealthy donor class).

Only 31% of their revenue comes from member stations and only 13% of that comes from CPB or government sources, which totals up to 4% coming from the government.

So corporate interests fund NPR more than 10x times as much as the government.

Then why did NPR have a ton of content on their website about how absolutely critical federal funding was to their operation?

Because they don't want liberals thinking too hard about how much Archer Daniels Midland pays them.

And threats to their federal funding are also probably great for their pledge drives.

Scroll up the thread; your question is already answered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35542645

Federal funding isn't critical to NPR, but it's important to the public radio ecosystem of small local stations, who get ~13% of their funding from government.

So evidently NPR disagrees with the "it's just a small percentage, who cares" judgement (until that judgment being on their website becomes embarrassing)

"We don't want our customers being unable to afford our products" is, I suspect, a common opinion among businesses. I'm not sure why you'd find it surprising.

Walmart wants people to spend their food stamps on their groceries. Tesla wants people to use the EV tax credits on their cars. They don't get accused of being government controlled because of it.

So NPR never criticizes the government?