Is NPR truly owned by the public?

With a network as expansive as NPR's, I have always been amazed at how a network that ends every segment with a plea for funds, can afford to air large quantities of high quality programming nationwide. Estimating the costs of modern radio production in my heads, it just doesn't seem logical that the media minority NPR supporters can afford such an extensive network of affiliates and national hub stations. Doing what any sensible person in the Digital Age would do, I took to the internet to find the true owner of NPR. What I stumbled upon was an anonymous blog post on elingreso.com, summing up NPR's ownership as a deadly cocktail: one part government/tax/independent funding, two parts corporate sponsorship.

In 1970, National Public Radio was created as a provision of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, signed into effect by President Lyndon B. Johnson. At its conception NPR was an independent news source, gaining most of its monetary support from government aid. In the 1980s, under the economic policies of "Reaganomics" (supply-side, essentially) the government cut back on spending on government programs, to boost our economy, causing NPR to look for outside donors. As much as the anonymous author of the blog mentioned in the previous paragraph accurately explains the trend shift in funding for NPR, he or she fails to recognize the current numbers of how NPR's funding is created.

Behold, NPR releases how their funding is provided in a snazzy little pie chart, and shockingly, I was as wrong in my assumptions as was my anonymous friend.

The public actually provides most of the funding (39%), followed by corporate sponsors (17%). The public still has an interest in their public radio, even though they have been accused of being puppets of corporate America, their business "Big Brother" can only get them so far.