NPR Is (Indirectly) Government-Funded

In recent days, the Twitter account for National Public Radio (NPR) received the supposedly damning label of “U.S. state-affiliated media.” Previously, such a label was only reserved for the media outlet Russia Today (RT) for being affiliated with Russia.

NPR called Twitter’s labelling “disturbing and unacceptable.” The national broadcaster had previously stated that most of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and contributions, and only around 1 percent of its funding comes from the federal government.

While it’s technically true that they don’t get very much federal money, it’s also not true.

It doesn’t receive much directly from the federal government, yet it gets plenty through grants given to NPR member stations who then give their money to NPR as programming fees.

While NPR received only $8 million in grants directly from the government via the Center for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 2021, NPR member stations received $101 million from CPB based on annual reports.

Most of that money received by member stations goes right to NPR. In 2021, NPR received over $90 million in programming fees from member stations—$10 million less than what CPB gave the stations.

Based on a document published by NPR in 2013, there were over 1,000 975 NPR member stations across the country.

Programming Fees as a Percentage of Station Costs

CPB’s radio grants to member stations are not exclusively for NPR programming but for general operations as well. Yet those programming fees are a substantial expense, and there’s not much leftover to help pay for other expenses like broadcasting licenses or developing local news content.

For example, the station WAMU—an NPR member station in Washington, D.C. affiliated with American University—NPR radio dues accounted for almost $2.7 million in 2021—7.6 percent of annual expenditures.

The station received $2.6 million in grants from CPB that year—just slightly less than what it paid in NPR programming fees.

While the CPB grants were almost equivalent to what WAMU pays in NPR programming fees, they did receive additional grant money—$4.6 million in total—from other federal agencies.