Are your well-meaning liberal friends clogging your e-mail box with that “Save NPR Petition,” asking you to sign and forward it to your well-meaning liberal friends so that it can eventually be dumped into the inboxes of the president, the vice president, and the speaker?
Well, feel free to hit delete the next time you see it. NPR is not in peril, according to its Washington, D.C., spokesperson. Besides, NPR receives only a scant 2 or 3 percent of its funding directly from the feds. (Other federal funds arrive indirectly via the public radio stations that have elected to spend their federal monies on NPR membership.)
“There’s no petition required to get any kind of funding. I don’t know who started that and I guess their intentions were good,” says NPR’s Kathy Scott. NPR has no connection to the petition, which has circulated on the Internet for about a year.
