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Here's what NPR's own website says about their federal funding: "Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continua

Here's what NPR's own website says about their federal funding: "Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR." "Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)" "The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution." "Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism—especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities." https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

ceejayoz 4y ago
That excerpt isn't about their funding. The CPB funds (in part) public radio stations. Many of those public radio stations purchase NPR-produced content. (And from other similar providers like American Public Media (Marketplace), PRX (This American Life), etc.) NPR's customers can't afford NPR's offerings without said Federal funding, which is why NPR's particularly interested in it.
- wyager 4y ago
  An agency that is federally funded through 1 layer of intermediaries is still, in the most practical sense, federally funded.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    As the article indicates, those stations receive an average of 8% from CPB, and 5% from Federal/state/local government. The other 87% comes from elsewhere - 43% of it as individual donations. If they're "government funded" as a result, slap the label on Walmart and McDonalds. They can't operate without Federal funding, either. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-top-employers-of-medicaid-and-food-stamp-beneficiaries.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
    - rahimnathwani 4y ago
      Are you suggesting that Walmart and McDonald's receive more in government subsidies than they pay in taxes?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        I'm suggest Walmart similarly benefits from indirect Federal funding of their business, in the form of wages/benefits they don't have to give out to their employees receiving public assistance to be able to live.
      - burkaman 4y ago
        Yes, probably. Not only does Walmart receive significant wage and benefit subsidies for its employees, but they also receive income from customers using food stamps. In 2014 that food stamp spending was estimated to be $13 billion, far more than they pay in taxes. - https://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big_box_stores_make_billions_off_food_stamps_often_it_s_their_own_workers.html https://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big...
  - anderber 4y ago
    By this logic there would so many companies that are "federally funded" that the label itself would become irrelevant.
    - floatrock 4y ago
      Including SpaceX. Starlink is a cute and a useful consumer product, but most of their balance sheet is defense money or giving rides to nasa.
      - vicktour 4y ago
        You could chuck most of Musk's portfolio into that category TBH. What ever company does that dumb tunnel idea and Tesla are the two additional companies that come to mind.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    Does the federal government assert editorial control over NPR?
    - wyager 4y ago
      It doesn't matter in the slightest if they do this explicitly. NPR would be stupid to bite the hand that feeds it.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        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.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        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.
        wyager 3y ago
        Then why did NPR have a ton of content on their website about how absolutely critical federal funding was to their operation?
        lamontcg 3y ago
        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.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        Scroll up the thread; your question is already answered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35542645 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.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Does that include Fox News when the Ad Council buys ads? Or when cable companies accept infrastructure subsidies?
  - roflyear 4y ago
    That would make probably almost all businesses in the US federally funded, as the US government is the single largest employer of people, and those people spend their money at private businesses. The US government purchases things from private businesses. Come on.
    - wyager 4y ago
      Yeah? Lockheed Martin could be reasonably described as "federally funded".
      - roflyear 3y ago
        Sure, but then what's the point of bringing it up at all?
        wyager 3y ago
        Because that's what the thread is about? If twitter marked lockheed as "government funded organization" I would not care
- civilized 4y ago
  That funding page says 31% of NPR's revenue comes from programming fees from member stations. Some of the 8% "other revenues" and 5% "PRSS contract" sound like they may come from member stations too, so let's call it 40% total from member stations as a best guess. Member stations themselves receive 13% of their revenue from the CPB (8%) and "federal, state, and local governments" (5%). Let's call that piece about 10% as a best guess of the federal-only part. 40% from member stations, which themselves get 10% from the Feds, is 4% additional from the Feds, bringing up NPR's federal revenue from the 1% they said to an all-in total of 5%. It seems that NPR's statement is a bit misleading, but not that materially so. (I'm as surprised as many of you may be, readers -- I thought they were much more federally funded as well.) My accounting skills are less than amateur, so please point out anything I may have missed. I'm not quite sure if 40% of 10% computation is a sound representation of what's going on.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Those member stations choose to spend that money on NPR content. They are under no obligation (aside from standing contracts) to continue to give that money to NPR in the future. They could opt to license programming from other sources. That's like saying a federal employee who chooses to donate some of their income to NPR is giving them government funding.
    - civilized 4y ago
      I agree to some extent, but when the federal government is funding similar organizations with a similar mission, they have a strong incentive to work together. Public radio stations are operated and listened to by the kind of people who like NPR programming. It's more like a federal employee who works for NPR and believes in NPR's mission donating to NPR. Yes, it's not compulsory, but the money is flowing towards entities with closely related missions that have a strong incentive to cooperate. But again, I agree with you that the voluntary nature of the cooperation makes it quite different from merely some kind of shell game.
veec_cas_tant 4y ago
There is also this part that you did not quote: >On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments. It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.
- DrThunder 4y ago
  They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence. This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.
  - generic92034 4y ago
    Can you name any media company being truly independent? Or is any owner excluded from the potential list of dependencies?
    - DrThunder 4y ago
      I'm discussing government independence specifically, not whether companies are beholden to someone else. Obviously all businesses are beholden to someone. Yes you should always have an interest in what/who companies are beholden to. There's a reason Nike and Apple don't chastise the Chinese government.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Twitter is funny in this regard, why is Musk so keen on Russia and China?
      - d23 4y ago
        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.
jacquesm 4y ago
Besides the fact that they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government the bigger issue is that of editorial control and NPR is pretty clean as far as I can see. Unlike most of the other entities labeled 'State Affiliated Media'. Naming NPR in one breath with those others is intentionally tarnishing them and playing to the crowd, which is something that Elon has been engaging in in a very specific manner since he took over Twitter. Trying to suggest that this is appropriate is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people jumping in to defend Musk in the most weird ways. I don't see Tesla's account labelled as State Affiliated and yet, if we were to judge solely by the amount of funds received they would qualify long before NPR would.
- nostromo 4y ago
  If the public funding isn’t important to them, then don’t take it and become truly independent. Or keep the funding and be open about it. I suspect most of NPR's followers are fine with their public funding, it's literally in the name. They're probably more upset about all their corporate funding. Tesla’s funding is neither here nor there; it’s not a news outlet.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    NPR needs money and they need editorial freedom, they seem to have both. I really can't fault them for that, editorial independence is the yardstick by which media should be judged unless there is outright ownership.
    - nostromo 4y ago
      Money can be easily tracked. Editorial independence cannot be. I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been. They know member donations are their biggest funding source, so they largely tell their audience what they want to hear. Put another way, I don't think perfect editorial independence exists. Everyone knows where their bread is being buttered. Having a badge on Twitter saying you're independent would be entirely a judgement call.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Your quoting was rather disingenuous. How could you not quote the last line (regarding how much of their budget comes from this source), when you quoted almost all the rest regarding federal funding?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
burkaman 4y ago
It would be helpful to add some numbers to your comment. 31% of NPR revenues are from member stations, and 13% of that 31% is federal funding. So ~4% of NPR revenue is indirect federal funds. This is, to give one example, substantially less than the portion of grocery store revenues that come from SNAP. Do we consider all grocery chains to be government sponsored businesses? Is Y Combinator government sponsored, since so many of its investments received money from the SVB bailout? My answer would be yes, government support is essential for most businesses, but that makes this label useless in theory and malicious in practice when only applied to a tiny subset of government-funded companies.
DrThunder 4y ago
And this proves they're not government funded / affiliated how? Didn't they tweet that their funding by the government was so minuscule that they shouldn't be labeled state-affiliated? You cannot simultaneously say that while also declaring you can't exist to your full capacity without government funding.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- guywithahat 4y ago
  The irony is that it's likely not minuscule. Although NPR claims its around ~5%, independent investigations usually put it closer to 20-40%
- skybrian 4y ago
  You might compare with a government contractor like SpaceX. Private organizations can depend on government funding without being fully government-controlled. Speaking of SpaceX as a privately owned company is still accurate. Calling it state-affiliated wouldn’t be entirely wrong (they work with NASA), but a bit weird. In NPR’s case, their customers (public radio stations) receive a lot of government funding, so it’s one step removed compared to a government contractor. NPR is a nonprofit with a board of directors that includes NPR member station managers, though. Control over NPR seems rather diffuse? Nonprofit boards are often kind of weird that way.
  - DrThunder 3y ago
    Why are you bring up non-media companies? That label was specifically for media. You know, the ones that are supposed to bring you neutral information.... which is why the label makes more sense for media companies.
kodah 4y ago
Elon's playing word games. When the average person talks about State Affiliated Media they're referring to editorial control. As far as I know NPR has always had editorial control and goes to great lengths to maintain neutrality in their writing. They've certainly screwed up in major ways before, but compared to MSNBC, Fox, the NYT, NYP, and CNN I'd say NPR looks like a saint. The irony I see here is that Twitter is on record as to being involved in suppression exercises around COVID, where they basically acted as the governments hands to suppress legitimate voices. Given that, Twitter needs to wear its own State Affiliated Media badge. Hell, what do you even call an entity that willfully suppresses valid and good information that is not favorable to the government? A state apologist?
- preseinger 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - kodah 4y ago
    Normal? That's not what I was talking about in this specific instance of Twitter though. Maybe you can make your point more clear.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      The parent comment isn’t referring to Twitter surely?
      - kodah 4y ago
        I think they were trying to say because Twitter successfully suppressed conspiracy theories in the past that it gives them a pass when the information happened to not be a conspiracy theory. If that was the takeaway, I fully disagree. If you get into the suppression game, even for the right reasons, you deserve whatever comes your way when you're wrong even once. That's how we keep powerful entities honest.
        3y ago
giaour 4y ago
At least as of the time of this comment, no special label was applied to Stars and Stripes (50% funded by the US Department of Defense), Al Hurra (100% funded by the US Agency for Global Media), or CBC (>50% funded by the Canadian government). Maybe that's just a mistake, and every news organization that gets a dollar of funding from any government will eventually get its own "Government-funded Media" label. Or maybe Twitter's new owner is being a petty little despot and didn't like a recent NPR story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
fortuna86 3y ago
Yes, every organization when faced with potential budget cuts refers to all of their budget as "essential". This should not be surprising.
fundad 3y ago
I love that people are trying to coat his actions in reason like "look at the numbers, it's not spite it's truth" and then Elon tweets "Defund @NPR" and makes them look silly.

ceejayoz 4y ago

That excerpt isn't about their funding. The CPB funds (in part) public radio stations. Many of those public radio stations purchase NPR-produced content. (And from other similar providers like American Public Media (Marketplace), PRX (This American Life), etc.) NPR's customers can't afford NPR's offerings without said Federal funding, which is why NPR's particularly interested in it.

wyager 4y ago
An agency that is federally funded through 1 layer of intermediaries is still, in the most practical sense, federally funded.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  As the article indicates, those stations receive an average of 8% from CPB, and 5% from Federal/state/local government. The other 87% comes from elsewhere - 43% of it as individual donations. If they're "government funded" as a result, slap the label on Walmart and McDonalds. They can't operate without Federal funding, either. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-top-employers-of-medicaid-and-food-stamp-beneficiaries.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that Walmart and McDonald's receive more in government subsidies than they pay in taxes?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      I'm suggest Walmart similarly benefits from indirect Federal funding of their business, in the form of wages/benefits they don't have to give out to their employees receiving public assistance to be able to live.
    - burkaman 4y ago
      Yes, probably. Not only does Walmart receive significant wage and benefit subsidies for its employees, but they also receive income from customers using food stamps. In 2014 that food stamp spending was estimated to be $13 billion, far more than they pay in taxes. - https://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big_box_stores_make_billions_off_food_stamps_often_it_s_their_own_workers.html https://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big...
- anderber 4y ago
  By this logic there would so many companies that are "federally funded" that the label itself would become irrelevant.
  - floatrock 4y ago
    Including SpaceX. Starlink is a cute and a useful consumer product, but most of their balance sheet is defense money or giving rides to nasa.
    - vicktour 4y ago
      You could chuck most of Musk's portfolio into that category TBH. What ever company does that dumb tunnel idea and Tesla are the two additional companies that come to mind.
- mcguire 4y ago
  Does the federal government assert editorial control over NPR?
  - wyager 4y ago
    It doesn't matter in the slightest if they do this explicitly. NPR would be stupid to bite the hand that feeds it.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      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.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      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.
      - wyager 3y ago
        Then why did NPR have a ton of content on their website about how absolutely critical federal funding was to their operation?
        lamontcg 3y ago
        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.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        Scroll up the thread; your question is already answered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35542645 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.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Does that include Fox News when the Ad Council buys ads? Or when cable companies accept infrastructure subsidies?
- roflyear 4y ago
  That would make probably almost all businesses in the US federally funded, as the US government is the single largest employer of people, and those people spend their money at private businesses. The US government purchases things from private businesses. Come on.
  - wyager 4y ago
    Yeah? Lockheed Martin could be reasonably described as "federally funded".
    - roflyear 3y ago
      Sure, but then what's the point of bringing it up at all?
      - wyager 3y ago
        Because that's what the thread is about? If twitter marked lockheed as "government funded organization" I would not care
civilized 4y ago
That funding page says 31% of NPR's revenue comes from programming fees from member stations. Some of the 8% "other revenues" and 5% "PRSS contract" sound like they may come from member stations too, so let's call it 40% total from member stations as a best guess. Member stations themselves receive 13% of their revenue from the CPB (8%) and "federal, state, and local governments" (5%). Let's call that piece about 10% as a best guess of the federal-only part. 40% from member stations, which themselves get 10% from the Feds, is 4% additional from the Feds, bringing up NPR's federal revenue from the 1% they said to an all-in total of 5%. It seems that NPR's statement is a bit misleading, but not that materially so. (I'm as surprised as many of you may be, readers -- I thought they were much more federally funded as well.) My accounting skills are less than amateur, so please point out anything I may have missed. I'm not quite sure if 40% of 10% computation is a sound representation of what's going on.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Those member stations choose to spend that money on NPR content. They are under no obligation (aside from standing contracts) to continue to give that money to NPR in the future. They could opt to license programming from other sources. That's like saying a federal employee who chooses to donate some of their income to NPR is giving them government funding.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I agree to some extent, but when the federal government is funding similar organizations with a similar mission, they have a strong incentive to work together. Public radio stations are operated and listened to by the kind of people who like NPR programming. It's more like a federal employee who works for NPR and believes in NPR's mission donating to NPR. Yes, it's not compulsory, but the money is flowing towards entities with closely related missions that have a strong incentive to cooperate. But again, I agree with you that the voluntary nature of the cooperation makes it quite different from merely some kind of shell game.

veec_cas_tant 4y ago

There is also this part that you did not quote: >On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments. It is irrelevant to most of the controversy, however. The original Twitter label declared that NPR did not have editorial independence from the government.

DrThunder 4y ago
They don't. Just because you say you do doesn't make it so. When a big part of your funding comes from the people that can vote to cut it at any moment you do not have true independence. This is as silly as the argument saying the 1st amendment isn't violated by social media when you have the government literally asking these companies for censorship.
- generic92034 4y ago
  Can you name any media company being truly independent? Or is any owner excluded from the potential list of dependencies?
  - DrThunder 4y ago
    I'm discussing government independence specifically, not whether companies are beholden to someone else. Obviously all businesses are beholden to someone. Yes you should always have an interest in what/who companies are beholden to. There's a reason Nike and Apple don't chastise the Chinese government.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Twitter is funny in this regard, why is Musk so keen on Russia and China?
    - d23 4y ago
      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.

jacquesm 4y ago

Besides the fact that they receive only a tiny percentage of their funding from the government the bigger issue is that of editorial control and NPR is pretty clean as far as I can see. Unlike most of the other entities labeled 'State Affiliated Media'. Naming NPR in one breath with those others is intentionally tarnishing them and playing to the crowd, which is something that Elon has been engaging in in a very specific manner since he took over Twitter. Trying to suggest that this is appropriate is edging pretty close to that cartoon about people jumping in to defend Musk in the most weird ways. I don't see Tesla's account labelled as State Affiliated and yet, if we were to judge solely by the amount of funds received they would qualify long before NPR would.

nostromo 4y ago
If the public funding isn’t important to them, then don’t take it and become truly independent. Or keep the funding and be open about it. I suspect most of NPR's followers are fine with their public funding, it's literally in the name. They're probably more upset about all their corporate funding. Tesla’s funding is neither here nor there; it’s not a news outlet.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  NPR needs money and they need editorial freedom, they seem to have both. I really can't fault them for that, editorial independence is the yardstick by which media should be judged unless there is outright ownership.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    Money can be easily tracked. Editorial independence cannot be. I actually think NPR has been captured by their audience in the same way MSNBC and Fox News has been. They know member donations are their biggest funding source, so they largely tell their audience what they want to hear. Put another way, I don't think perfect editorial independence exists. Everyone knows where their bread is being buttered. Having a badge on Twitter saying you're independent would be entirely a judgement call.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Your quoting was rather disingenuous. How could you not quote the last line (regarding how much of their budget comes from this source), when you quoted almost all the rest regarding federal funding?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

burkaman 4y ago

It would be helpful to add some numbers to your comment. 31% of NPR revenues are from member stations, and 13% of that 31% is federal funding. So ~4% of NPR revenue is indirect federal funds. This is, to give one example, substantially less than the portion of grocery store revenues that come from SNAP. Do we consider all grocery chains to be government sponsored businesses? Is Y Combinator government sponsored, since so many of its investments received money from the SVB bailout? My answer would be yes, government support is essential for most businesses, but that makes this label useless in theory and malicious in practice when only applied to a tiny subset of government-funded companies.

DrThunder 4y ago

And this proves they're not government funded / affiliated how? Didn't they tweet that their funding by the government was so minuscule that they shouldn't be labeled state-affiliated? You cannot simultaneously say that while also declaring you can't exist to your full capacity without government funding.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
guywithahat 4y ago
The irony is that it's likely not minuscule. Although NPR claims its around ~5%, independent investigations usually put it closer to 20-40%
skybrian 4y ago
You might compare with a government contractor like SpaceX. Private organizations can depend on government funding without being fully government-controlled. Speaking of SpaceX as a privately owned company is still accurate. Calling it state-affiliated wouldn’t be entirely wrong (they work with NASA), but a bit weird. In NPR’s case, their customers (public radio stations) receive a lot of government funding, so it’s one step removed compared to a government contractor. NPR is a nonprofit with a board of directors that includes NPR member station managers, though. Control over NPR seems rather diffuse? Nonprofit boards are often kind of weird that way.
- DrThunder 3y ago
  Why are you bring up non-media companies? That label was specifically for media. You know, the ones that are supposed to bring you neutral information.... which is why the label makes more sense for media companies.

kodah 4y ago

Elon's playing word games. When the average person talks about State Affiliated Media they're referring to editorial control. As far as I know NPR has always had editorial control and goes to great lengths to maintain neutrality in their writing. They've certainly screwed up in major ways before, but compared to MSNBC, Fox, the NYT, NYP, and CNN I'd say NPR looks like a saint. The irony I see here is that Twitter is on record as to being involved in suppression exercises around COVID, where they basically acted as the governments hands to suppress legitimate voices. Given that, Twitter needs to wear its own State Affiliated Media badge. Hell, what do you even call an entity that willfully suppresses valid and good information that is not favorable to the government? A state apologist?

preseinger 4y ago
[flagged]
- kodah 4y ago
  Normal? That's not what I was talking about in this specific instance of Twitter though. Maybe you can make your point more clear.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    The parent comment isn’t referring to Twitter surely?
    - kodah 4y ago
      I think they were trying to say because Twitter successfully suppressed conspiracy theories in the past that it gives them a pass when the information happened to not be a conspiracy theory. If that was the takeaway, I fully disagree. If you get into the suppression game, even for the right reasons, you deserve whatever comes your way when you're wrong even once. That's how we keep powerful entities honest.
      - 3y ago

giaour 4y ago

At least as of the time of this comment, no special label was applied to Stars and Stripes (50% funded by the US Department of Defense), Al Hurra (100% funded by the US Agency for Global Media), or CBC (>50% funded by the Canadian government). Maybe that's just a mistake, and every news organization that gets a dollar of funding from any government will eventually get its own "Government-funded Media" label. Or maybe Twitter's new owner is being a petty little despot and didn't like a recent NPR story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

fortuna86 3y ago

Yes, every organization when faced with potential budget cuts refers to all of their budget as "essential". This should not be surprising.

fundad 3y ago

I love that people are trying to coat his actions in reason like "look at the numbers, it's not spite it's truth" and then Elon tweets "Defund @NPR" and makes them look silly.