To call NPR state-affiliated media to abuse the term to the point of incoherence. You may as well, by your own logic, say every media company ultimately has at least one dollar that's passed through the government and is thus state-affiliated. Thus they all deserve the label. Thus the label is meaningless, which incidentally, appears to be the point of this authoritarian-apolgistic nonsense.

It's continued abuse of language in the hopes of making it impossible for people to determine what's true -- in the hopes of making people give up even caring about facts.