Did NPR lie about their federal funding?
A deeper dive into the finances of NPR and CPB.
The ridiculous fight began on April 4th, when Musk labelled NPR as “U.S. State-affiliated Media”. After much criticism (and apparent confusion from Musk) he switched that over to “Government Funded” on April 8th (this time also tagging Voice of America, and BBC). They later changed this to “Government-funded Media”, except for BBC which is now “Publicly-funded media”.
Somewhere amid all this uproar (during the “state-affiliated” phase), one of the various right-wingers who pose as horseshoe leftists, Michael Tracey (@mtracey) rushed to Musk’s defense:
In attempting to refute the claim that NPR doesn’t receive much government funding, Tracey presented “evidence” in the form of a revenue and expenses summary for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), implying that the summary mentions NPR expenditures, even though it doesn’t. Yet another example of right wingers putting a document right in front of you on the assumption that you are too lazy to actually read it. It is true that CPB is fully funded by the federal government and has a big budget (“big” being a relative term, as it is about 1 millionth of the total federal budget). But Tracey just sort of goes with the assumption that obviously all of CPB’s funds go to PBS and NPR, right? Well, no, not right.
If you read the summary and do the math, only about 7% of CPB funds are allocated to radio. As it turns out though, almost all of that goes to individual stations, not NPR.
Bizarrely, Tracey points this out, with a document that shows this, while (again) lying to us about what it actually says.
I didn’t include his images here that went with the above tweet, but the link in the previous paragraph takes you to the relevant image (there’s another included image which appears to be mere distraction). Examining that image we find that 93% of all CPB funding goes to local radio stations, while the remaining 7% goes to… local radio stations… lumped together with NPR, PRI, AMI, and AIR. (These last three being other public radio companies and organizations which are not NPR). If we guessed at equal division among those five groups that receive 7%, that would mean that less than 1.5% of CPB’s budget goes to NPR. (It turns out that, in terms of grants, for the years I found below, the number was actually zero percent because there were zero CPB grants to NPR.)
Having lied to you about images he has put right in front of you twice in a row, Tracey then… does the exact same thing, tweeting this image (in the same thread as his above linked tweets).
It does seem to show that revenue is 8% from the CPB, as well as 5% from federal, state, and local sources (so we don’t know what the portion of each of those is).
Except… reading the text you can see that this is labelled “Member Station Revenues”, and with the tiniest bit of googling, you will find that NPR does not own, nor operate, affiliated stations. Maybe Tracey thinks his readers will only read the section he highlighted?
But Tracey, being a responsible reporter, doesn’t merely clip the image, but he also links to the source, where if one actually reads the document (yet again, Tracey seems to to think you’ll listen to him instead of doing this), you’ll notice that he stopped his clipping just short of a paragraph that highlights that:
“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.”
Note that the bolded test is NPR’s emphasis. It hints at the reality that CPB funds primarily go to the development of local programming, i.e. non-NPR programming. And just a few lines later in the text you’ll find this gem:
Why, that’s the very claim that he just spent three tweets attempting to refute, claiming it was bizarre that anyone would think such a thing.
Some of his trolls made the argument for him in the comments on this thread that somehow it makes no difference if CPB money goes to local stations instead of NPR, because, after all, they’re just part of NPR, right? No. NPR merely provides a small portion of the total programming local stations need to be on the air. These stations must develop their own programming, fill at least 18 hours of air time each day, staff their station, and pay the bills too. None of that money goes back to NPR.
If 8% of a local station’s money comes from CPB, and, let’s say, 10% of their money goes to NPR (this number is hard to pin down, and varies wildly by station), then the simplest assumption is that CPB is paying 8% of 10% of their budget to NPR from CPB. In other words, 0.8% of a local station’s total budget would be CPB funds handed back to NPR. All other things being equal. Of course, some grants come with limits on usage, so all things aren’t equal, and that number is almost certainly lower.
We’ll revisit this from NPR’s point of view below.
NPR’s Actual Budget
There is an auditor’s report that includes more detailed figures for NPR from 2020 and 2021. For these years, based on this budget, as well as everywhere else I have been able to look, the total grants from CPB to NPR in both 2020 and 2021 was… $0.00. Zero dollars. Zip. Bupkis. Nada. Nothing. Goose eggs.
They DID receive federal grants though — from The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowments for the Humanities. They also received $10,000 from the Small Business Administration. The total grants in those years were $84,500 in 2021 and $100,360 in 2020. For 2021 this represents less than 0.03 percent of their budget. That’s not a typo or a math error. Less than three ten hundredths of one percent of their budget.
Is 1% a fib? It’s complicated.
BUT, that report does mention CPB (see page 27), and in a way that’s kind of confusing at first. The CPB set aside 25 million dollars over a four year period from 2017 to 2021 to provide funds to NPR. Split across four years, that’s over six million dollars a year, which is well over 1% of their budget. But the report also says that for both years in question, NPR received about two and a half million from this fund from CPB. This is in fact roughly 1% of their budget in each of those years.
But what is this money? It isn’t grant money (and note that NPR’s claim of less than 1% specified grants). It’s a contracted fee for service.
CPB serves not just NPR and its radio stations but also other radio networks, as well as unaffiliated local radio stations. One of the services CPB provides to these radio networks is the Public Radio Satellite System, or PRSS. This satellite system is used to transfer programming around the nation for several public radio networks and production companies, including the Public Radio Exchange and American Public Media, as well as NPR.
While CPB provides this service, it doesn’t actually run the PRSS itself. Instead, they subcontract this out. To NPR.
So the 25 million dollar fund is available as needed by NPR to service and maintain the PRSS, so that CPB can then provide it to NPR, as well as other media companies and organizations under the CPB radio umbrella. However, NPR can only claim money from this PRSS fund that it actually uses. And the money it receives, and then spends, is not for the sole benefit of NPR, but for the benefit of all CPB-funded radio networks.
When I first came across this little detail (a few weeks ago), I was wondering how long it would take right-wingers, who are supposedly deeply interested in NPR finances at this moment, to find this fact and spin it into some kind of story about hidden federal funds going to NPR.
Except, in a world where right-wing propagandists like Tracey are happy to blatantly lie, over and over again, about documents they’ve put right in front of you, to make you think that NPR is significantly or even mostly funded by the federal government, actual facts get in the way. These actual facts undermine their argument. And sure, maybe they can spin this into a scandal, but it’s much easier and lower effort to spin scandals without bothering to do any research at all. So really, it’s no surprise that these details escaped their notice.
Conclusion
Even if we accept the argument that CPB money to local stations eventually finds its way to NPR, at worst, this is 8% of NPR’s revenue from member affiliates. Based on above links to NPR financing, member affiliate fees are about 31% of their revenue. The simple math says that this is about 2.6% of NPR’s total revenue, coming indirectly from CPB via local stations. It’s still a bad assumption because some CPB grants are locked down for other purposes, but we’ll go with it for the sake of argument. This, combined with the PRSS money (which NPR doesn’t get to keep, or spend on “leftist” content) means that at most about three and a half percent of their total revenues come from federal sources in any way whatsoever. But again, almost all of this is money that either didn’t come directly from the government, or can’t be used by NPR to fund any content. It’s a worst-case inflated number, blindly accepting all the arguments the right wing is making.
The direct federal funding of any type that can be found in 2021 that they can use for their “leftist” content is, as stated above, less than three hundredths of one percent of their budget.
I can hear right-wingers yelling: “but NPR wouldn’t exist without member stations, so all the member station money should count”. No. That’s not how it works. If you took away the CPB grant money, what this would mean to almost all stations is that they’d have to reduce their own local programming. Or reduce community services. Like the community use of a production studio for producing local content like radio shows and podcasts.
The reality is that the GOP hates those local services anyway. And would be happy to not help communities have easy access to producing media. But “screw your college radio stations and your community access” doesn’t sell nearly as well to the right-wing base as does the lie that the government is funding “leftist” NPR.
The elimination of funding for NPR (and PBS and CPB) is a right-wing talking point that they bring up every few years. It’s interesting that in this case it was brought into the limelight by a lie initiated by Elon Musk.
It’s also notable that Musk’s change from “state-affiliated” to “government funded” came after an email exchange with NPR that clarified that they’re not government funded. So it wasn’t just Musk’s minions like Tracey feeding this false NPR narrative, it was also Musk himself.
It’s almost like Musk bought Twitter just to produce right-wing propaganda.