National Public Radio on Monday ran a so-called “sponsor message” promoting pharma giant Procter & Gamble’s nerve-relief drug Nervive, “designed to reduce occasional nerve aches, weakness and discomfort.” The message, effectively a commercial, is tied to one of hundreds of advertiser deals that are far more important to NPR than government funding. NPR brought in $100 million from corporate sponsors in 2023, compared to only $7 million in federal funding.
The thinly disguised commercials such as the “sponsor message” from Procter & Gamble—aimed straight at NPR’s rapidly aging audience with aching hands and feet—are now the focus of the new Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, who may have found the powerful news giant’s Achilles’ heel. Carr has now launched an investigation into whether the news nonprofit’s “sponsor messages” have violated federal rules that prohibit taxpayer-funded radio stations from “airing commercials or other promotional announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.”
NPR—whose $100 million sponsorship haul in 2023 came from around 450 corporate sponsors—has been criticized for decades by conservatives who object to an overtly liberal news outlet with enormous reach receiving taxpayer dollars.
“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law,” wrote Carr, a longtime commissioner of the FCC who is also backing similar probes of CBS, NBC, and ABC for allegations that their news coverage improperly favored Kamala Harris despite getting access to lucrative public airwaves. Regarding NPR, Carr took issue with providing the organization with taxpayer money, which, while dwarfed by sponsorship revenue, is believed to be essential to NPR’s operations. NPR airing advertisements for for-profit companies “would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr said.
Carr’s complaint is driven by persistent conservative complaints that hinge on NPR’s liberal bias. NPR news programs such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition, which each reach about 15 million listeners a week, have aired reliably liberal programming for more than 50 years (the network denies that its programming is biased). And in the years following the death of George Floyd, NPR, behind the scenes, became radicalized, according to a veteran NPR senior editor, Uri Berliner, who resigned under pressure after he published an explosive, first-hand account of NPR’s transformation into a “progressive silo.” His public resignation led to the discovery of impassioned social media posts by NPR president Katherine Maher in which she condoned censorship of conservatives and defended violent looting during Black Lives Matter protests.
Maher last week defended NPR in response to Carr’s investigation, saying it “complies with federal regulations, including the FCC guidelines on underwriting messages for noncommercial educational broadcasters.” She added, “We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules.”
NPR receives taxpayer funding directly through the federal government and through donations from its member stations, which also receive taxpayer money.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to be a guide to Trump’s second term—though the president has disavowed it—calls for an end to all taxpayer funding for public broadcasting, calling such a move “good policy and good politics.” During his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to cut funding for NPR, PBS, and other publicly funded, far-left institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In all these cases, Congress saved the funding. NPR’s supporters have, over the years, effectively appealed to Congress that some of the nonpartisan, local programming done by public broadcasting’s local radio and TV affiliates is worth the public expenditure and the headaches.
This time, however, could be different, and not just because of the new Trump administration’s determination to wield its power more effectively. Carr’s investigation, focusing its fire on NPR’s biggest source of revenue, is a tactic that Congress may find more difficult to undo.
According to Carr, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, led by acting director Patrick Webre, will oversee the probe into the “sponsor messages.” Should the FCC find NPR at fault, it “may result in negotiated settlements or enforcement actions that include monetary penalties and injunctive directives,” according to the FCC website. if NPR persists in violating FCC rules, it could lead to repeated and escalating fines.
Republicans—who hold a trifecta in Washington, D.C.,—could cite any violations of regulations to justify cutting off taxpayer funds for NPR.
In the end, the fight over NPR’s use of ads will likely result in a debate over the interpretations of the Communications Act, which sets rules for the content that publicly funded broadcasters can air.
NPR is allowed to run sponsor messages, but they are not allowed to be overly promotional or make “calls to action.” Were one to invoke Justice Potter Stewart’s famous description of pornography, “I know it when I see it,” NPR’s sponsor messages are clearly overt, promotional advertising whose scripts could just as easily be seen during commercial breaks on MSNBC, Sunday morning public affairs shows, or other upscale, left-leaning news programming.
Furthermore, according to NPR’s own interpretation of FCC regulations, its radio ads cannot make “health claims” or use “qualitative language” by describing “favorable qualities, benefits, and claims.”
But the recent Procter & Gamble “sponsor message,” which ran throughout the day Monday on NPR’s affiliates in San Francisco, New York City, and other major media markets, makes direct health claims, and certainly more direct health claims than most pharmaceutical advertisements on commercial radio and television which often—deliberately—make no health claims at all. Nervive, according to Procter & Gamble’s sponsor message, can “reduce occasional nerve aches, weakness, and discomfort” in hands or feet due to aging. This advertisement appears to blatantly violate both federal regulations and the outlet’s own internal recommendations about what it can broadcast.
And the Nervive “sponsor message” is far from alone in making direct, promotional claims. Most of the sponsor messages do.
An advertisement on KQED, the NPR affiliate in San Francisco, touted Celadyne, a federal defense contractor. The ad states Celadyne “offers solid-state storage solutions optimized for AI, with higher capacities, greater speed, and energy efficiency.” Greater, presumably, than its competitors.
WBUR, the NPR Boston affiliate, promoted the hospital network Mass General Brigham, which “provid[es] leading cancer care with the most cancer specialists in New England.”
“They’re one team, working together with new elaborations, new approaches, and advanced treatments like the region’s only proton therapy center.”
NPR touts its advertisements as more effective than ads on a commercial radio station, something it proclaims to potential sponsors. The “sponsor messages” are a boon to its corporate sponsors’ bottom line, both because the advertisements are less cluttered and because of a “halo effect” that NPR listeners “attribute to the companies that sponsor us.”
In sales pitches to potential advertisers, it touts a study it commissioned in 2018 that found NPR sponsor ads are “23% more memorable than traditional radio ads.” That higher rate of “memory encoding,” according to NPR, “has been shown to correlate with decision-making and purchase intent.”
Carr’s investigation comes as NPR’s corporate sponsorships have declined significantly in recent years, alongside the many other news organizations seeing drops in advertising revenue. NPR’s corporate sponsorship revenues fell from $135 million in 2022 to $101 million in 2023, a fall it attributed to “poor economic conditions.” Public broadcasting’s critics, from both the left and right, have asked if there’s a need for publicly funded news programming, considering the wide variety of news available online and via satellite, which can reach the remote areas outside the broadcast range of big, commercial radio stations that NPR’s programming was designed to penetrate.
The FCC and NPR did not respond to requests for comment.
