The Patriot Post® · NPR's 'Independent' State-Affiliated Media

Who knew the snowflakes at NPR were so touchy about the truth?

NPR, whose initials once proudly stood for “National Public Radio” and whose very existence owes to its establishment and financing by the government as part of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, is having a hissy fit about Twitter CEO Elon Musk having affixed a “state-affiliated” label to it.

At first, NPR President and CEO John Lansing shot back in response to the “state-affiliated” label, arguing in an April 5 tweet: “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”

Ultimately, though, the truth hurt too much. NPR decided to take its ball and go home: “NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter,” huffed NPR in a statement last week, “because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”

The huffing continued: “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence. We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audience and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR’s news, music, and cultural content.”

In an attempt at reconciliation, Twitter changed the outlet’s label from “government-affiliated media” to “government-funded media,” but it wasn’t good enough for the lefties leading NPR.

The decision by NPR is significant because its main Twitter account has 8.8 million followers and has 52 different Twitter feeds.

“What hypocrites!” Musk howled via a tweet on Wednesday, noting that NPR’s website said “federal funding is essential to public radio.”

Don’t call us “state-affiliated media,” cries the state-affiliated media.

As James Freeman explains at The Wall Street Journal: “For those who don’t follow government-favored media, the basic contradiction is this: Public broadcasters say they receive so little government funding that they remain completely independent. But if anyone ever tries to cut this allegedly trivial taxpayer funding, public broadcasters respond with howling lamentations about the looming destruction of essential communication and culture.”

How much of NPR’s funding comes from the government? It’s complicated. But it ain’t the 1% or 2% or 3% that NPR often claims. As David Strom writes at Hot Air, “That, my friends, is not remotely true.”

Strom continues: “It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. After a while, it becomes impossible to know where all that money comes from and where it winds up exactly. Which dollar went where for what? Who knows? NPR doesn’t, and they don’t want you to know either.”

So much for transparency. Why on earth don’t we know exactly how NPR is funded?

InfluenceWatch has done some digging, and it offers a very abbreviated description that begins to capture the complexity of the operation:

In 2020, National Public Radio earned $275,424,738 in revenue. 23 NPR generates its revenue from a wide variety of sources. In 2017, NPR earned 38% of its revenue from individual contributions; 19% from corporate sponsorship and licensing; 10% from foundation donations; 10% from university licensing and donations; and 4% from federal, state, and local governments via member stations.

Regardless of how NPR is funded, network leaders and personalities continue to make one thing perfectly clear: they believe that federal funding is “essential” to their mission. And if federal funding is essential, it can’t be so minimal as to be nonessential.

As for its undeniable left-wing bias, never forget: This is the same NPR that infamously refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal; the same NPR whose public editor, Kelly McBride, said in response to a listener during the run-up to the 2020 election that there were “many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation” and that Intelligence officials have warned “that Russia has been working overtime” to keep the story in the news.

Those remarks were, of course, grotesquely lazy at best and deeply and disgracefully dishonest at worst.

So, as long as there’s an NPR, and as long as it receives so much as a dollar of taxpayer funding, we’ll be here to call it out, just as our Michael Swartz did two years ago: “Back in the old pre-digital tuner days, when there was still an FM dial and band, you could usually find an NPR station somewhere on the left side. Some things never change, even if they should. There’s no need in this nation and no constitutional authority for taxpayers to subsidize left-wing propaganda, especially when the mainstream media marketplace is already full of corporate Democrats.”