As the article indicates, those stations receive an average of 8% from CPB, and 5% from Federal/state/local government. The other 87% comes from elsewhere - 43% of it as individual donations.
Yes, probably. Not only does Walmart receive significant wage and benefit subsidies for its employees, but they also receive income from customers using food stamps. In 2014 that food stamp spending was estimated to be $13 billion, far more than they pay in taxes.
I'm suggest Walmart similarly benefits from indirect Federal funding of their business, in the form of wages/benefits they don't have to give out to their employees receiving public assistance to be able to live.
You could chuck most of Musk's portfolio into that category TBH. What ever company does that dumb tunnel idea and Tesla are the two additional companies that come to mind.
That would make probably almost all businesses in the US federally funded, as the US government is the single largest employer of people, and those people spend their money at private businesses. The US government purchases things from private businesses.
39% of NPR revenue comes directly from corporations.
Another 12% comes from foundations (the wealthy donor class).
Only 31% of their revenue comes from member stations and only 13% of that comes from CPB or government sources, which totals up to 4% coming from the government.
So corporate interests fund NPR more than 10x times as much as the government.
Federal funding isn't critical to NPR, but it's important to the public radio ecosystem of small local stations, who get ~13% of their funding from government.
So evidently NPR disagrees with the "it's just a small percentage, who cares" judgement (until that judgment being on their website becomes embarrassing)
"We don't want our customers being unable to afford our products" is, I suspect, a common opinion among businesses. I'm not sure why you'd find it surprising.
Walmart wants people to spend their food stamps on their groceries. Tesla wants people to use the EV tax credits on their cars. They don't get accused of being government controlled because of it.
