I've never listened to NPR for very long. I feel myself getting dumber with every sentence uttered. It seems to be an outdated dinosaur of a lefty persuasion.
They cook the books. They receive no direct funding from the feds, but they get money from their member stations who pay fees to rebroadcast their tripe. 10% of the money member stations receive is in grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which are funded with federal dollars, in spite of the CPB supposedly being a private non-profit.
It gets more convoluted than that, but my head is already spinning from all the contortions they make you go through to track the money.
Anybody who goes to this much trouble to make it hard to tell exactly where their money is coming from is dishonest, period.
And let's not forget entropy. At every stage of the process, large amounts of money are disappearing into keeping this infrastructure going. CPB is getting a cut of those federal dollars, member stations are getting a cut, etc. The member stations' cut is where they justify that "1.5%" claim. I ask you: if those member stations are not NPR, then what is? NPR likes to claim that they're separate entities, which I contend is false. They are part of the NPR giant.