NPR’s business model has — or, blessedly,had— always been providing hard-left content to rich urban liberals and forcing everyone, including the conservatives they trashed, to pay for it via their tax dollars.

Not that they’d acknowledge that. NPR’s claim was that they got basically 1 percent of their annual revenue from your tax dollars, then would insist in the next breath they desperately needed that 1 percent.

Both of thesewere half-truths: A federal entity called NPR only got 1 percent of the public broadcaster’s revenue from tax dollars, but that was just the national organization; when you added up all the subsidies, direct and indirect, to NPR and its stations through other forms of taxpayer largesse, that number was roughly at least a quarter of its operating budget — which it did desperately need under its former business model.

Last May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order cutting off taxpayer funds from going to NPR (and its television cousin, PBS) from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: “At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” he said in astatementat the time.

That’s stilltied upin the courts, but I’ve beenreliably informedby past Democrat presidents that you can do a lot with “a pen” and “a phone,” and I suspect pulling NPR funding through the CPB is probably one of those things.

Even with the money tied up in court, NPR hasn’t really seen any significant diminishment in the quality or the reach of its programming, from what I’veobserved; I’m not sure whether that says more about thequality of NPR’s productor the need for the funding, or even if those two things are mutually exclusive.

And now, NPR is basically admitting what we knew all along: If they want to be a radio station by and for rich urban liberals, those rich urban liberals can fund it!

NEW:@NPRhas received two of the largest gifts in the public media network’s existence, totaling $113 million.

— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr)April 16, 2026

From NPR’sreporton NPR being saved from (relative) penury by rich NPR boosters:

Source: VidNews » Feed