NPR Tips Its Hand
What we can learn reading the network's lawsuit opposing President Trump's executive order targeting public media.
Before we talk about NPR’s court filing from earlier in the week, I have a few (more) Semipublic updates:
I’m excited to announce that, as of yesterday, I have finished collecting every publicly available Audited Financial Statement (AFS) from all public media stations from FY23. AFS availability on station sites tends to mirror AFR/FSR availability, and I was able to collect about 457 out of a possible 577 - or 80% of the entire public media system. I am parsing each AFS for select data to use in an upcoming data-heavy newsletter…stay tuned!
Collecting every AFS from 2023 is the last major document-gathering item in my roadmap (for now) and, together with AFRs and FSRs, makes this collection the most complete anywhere on the internet. I believe station financial information should be open and easy to find, so I’m also pleased to announce that I have uploaded every single AFS, AFR, and FSR I’ve gathered for my dataset to my GitHub. PDFs are organized by fiscal year, document type, and then a numerical ID I assigned to all CPB grantees to make indexing easier. Inside the folder containing the data from 2023 is a CSV with each CPB grantee indexed by numerical ID, name, and other geographical information.
If you ever find yourself using this collection of financial documents, or any of the data/analysis I’ve gathered, be sure to credit me in some way if you can.
It was quite a busy week so today’s newsletter will be short and sweet…with a little data analysis, I promise.
On Tuesday morning, National Public Radio announced that they’d be filing a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” executive order. Here’s what Katherine Maher, the network’s CEO, had to say:
The Executive Order is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press. It is an affront to the rights of NPR and NPR's 246 Member stations, which are locally owned, nonprofit, noncommercial media organizations serving all 50 states and territories.
“NPR and Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR Statement,” NPR.org
Another surprise was that Aspen Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT had been chosen to join the lawsuit. According to the stations’ attorney, Steven D. Zansberg, the three were chosen because they serve vastly different populations, from large metros to tiny rural communities.
They were also possibly chosen because Zansberg is a First Amendment attorney based out of Denver with experience defending high-profile media outlets and a history in public media.
As I’ve explored in earlier posts, the public media stations most at risk when it comes to losing federal funding are far and away Alaska stations, so I was somewhat surprised to see stations from Colorado chosen. Additionally, among these three, only KSUT is affiliated with Native Public Media, which I identified as another indicator of high reliance.
Indeed, as we can see in the above graph, KSUT had the highest reliance on grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: In FY25, a Community Service Grant of $330,000 made up about 19% of their total revenue. CPR and APR relied on CSGs for about 6% and 10% of their total revenues, respectively.
That means, collectively, the three relied on CPB funding for nearly 12% of their revenue, which is pretty close to the average among all NPR stations of 13% in FY23.
But more interestingly, buried under all of the press releases and news coverage is a link to NPR, APR, CPR, and KSUT’s full court complaint that was filed in the D.C. District Court on Tuesday. It’s always worth taking the time to read through full court documents, even though it’s a slog, because you never know what information plaintiffs might offer up in support of their complaint.
Here’s what caught my eye:
In total, NPR receives approximately $100 million, or approximately 31 percent of its annual operating revenue through membership fees and the licensing of content to its 246 Member stations
and later on:
The sudden loss of all federal funding, including PRSS funding, as well as fees from local public radio stations that otherwise would acquire programming from NPR would be catastrophic to NPR. … NPR relies on CPB grants to support essential functions, and without federal funding, NPR would need to shutter or downsize collaborative newsrooms and rural reporting initiatives and, at the same time, also eliminate or scale back critical national and international coverage that serves the entire public radio system and is not replicable at scale on the local level. Loss of all revenue from local public radio stations would dramatically harm NPR’s ability to execute its journalistic mission.
There are several remarkable tidbits here. First is the true number of member organizations that NPR has: In public, the network claims to have over 1,000 affiliate stations, which is technically true, but the vast majority of these are signal repeaters and simulcasts. The reality, as stated here in the complaint, is that NPR basically gets 246 different checks for their programming every year.
Second, and most important, is the admission of how much revenue they receive from stations as well as how much of their total revenue it comprises. This is a very important clue as to how NPR would fare if public media lost its funding. It also tells us where in their 990 to look to compare these numbers to: Part VIII, Line 2a; “Core & Other Prog. Fees".”
Above is a graph of station dues and how much of NPR’s total revenue they comprised from 2014 to 2023. The percentage fluctuates several points over the years, but the number NPR provided in its court filing, 31%, seems to neatly align with every 990 filing from 2018 to 2023. So too does their statement on how much total money they receive in station dues: Revenue from stations has consistently risen over the past few years, all the way to $96 million in 2023 - $100 million two years later isn’t a stretch.
But how does this help us understand how NPR would fare in the event of public media losing its funding? Think back to previous statements the network has made about its reliance on federal funding: NPR always states that less than 1% of their revenue comes from the government. Compare that to their frank admission that station fees, which stations use CPB grants to pay for, make up a whopping 30% of their revenue.
If we can calculate how many stations would theoretically close following the end of federal funding, we could estimate how much of that $100 million in station revenue NPR would stand to lose.
But that’s another newsletter for another day.
As always, here’s a shareable dashboard containing this newsletter’s graphs and data. If you enjoyed this article, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.
Hey Alex-Did you ever work with a researcher named Danilo Yanich out of the University of Delaware? He was my dissertation chair and was a phenomenal expert on local media.