If the shoe fits, wear it.

Sometimes it seems like the world has gone crazy.

Then you realize it is just some of the individuals and institutions which have gone crazy.

Head of U.S. Government News Agency Rejects Twitter’s ‘Government-Funded’ Label by Chuck Ross.  

The subheading is:

U.S. Agency for Global Media is funded entirely by the United States government

 

It is understandable that the US Government News Agency might not wish to acknowledge that it is fully and solely funded by the uS Government but to deny that "Government-Funded" is an appropriate descriptive label seems . . . well, crazy.  

When NPR complained about being labeled "Government Affiliated" you can see why they might object to the imputation that they are not editorially independent. However, there is a rational for the label.  NPR only receives 40% of its funding from listeners.  60% comes from a complex interlocking financial system of universities, foundations, heavily regulated corporate entities and federal, state, and local funding to NPR directly or to its local affiliate stations.  

Five or ten years ago, NPR, under different circumstances, was accused of being a government agency and members of Congress were advocating to zero out their funding.  The NPR CEO put forwards the strong assertion that only 10% of their funding came from the federal government and pushed back hard.  She virtually dared the congress people to pull funding.  

However, it turned out that NPR's affiliates (who provided the bulk of the non-listener funding to NPR) were 50-90% dependent on government funding.  The NPR CEO was incorrect and simply did not know that directly and indirectly NPR was strongly dependent on government largesse.  No government funding for the affiliates meant no affiliate funding for NPR.  And she did not know that until she started playing chicken with her critics.  But the affiliates knew just how dependent they were.  

Here we are back some years later with the same basic issue.  NPR could not survive without the direct or indirect government funding (for example, via universities).  They are a government affiliated information source and really do not want to acknowledge that.  To the point of playing semantic games to camouflage their dependency.

It is actually an easy question to resolve.

If NPR currently receives only 1% of its funding from the government, as is being claimed by NPR, then they should abandon that funding source.  Enterprises routinely manage revenue fluctuations of +/- 5% a year.  Losing 1% should be a once-off minor inconvenience.  

The fact that they do not make that commitment testifies to the empirical financial reality that they do indeed depend on the government and government affiliated entities for the plurality if not majority of their funding.  In terms of being government affiliated, the shoe sure seems to fit, regardless of the misleading protestations.