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.
