It's completely true.[0] 1% of NPR's funding comes directly from the Treasury. Sure, not all of the funding comes directly from the government, but certainly enough to give NPR a financial incentive to preserve government revenue. Further, another ~10% comes indirectly through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is "non-governmental" but is Treasury-funded and administered by presidential appointees. CPB allocates grants to states & local stations, who use those grants in part to pay for NPR programming via fees. The law dictates that a certain percentage of CPB grants are allocated toward NPR's nationally-produced programming.
> And anyway the piece isn't "slanted." In contrast to e.g. the Bloomberg piece it makes clear this is a relatively minor international tax regime issue and some of the facts are disputed. The SC isn't going to weigh in on realized vs unrealized gains writ large. I mean, a bunch of them might be assholes and idiots but they aren't fools.
The Supreme Court is a trier of law, not facts, so factual disputes are irrelevant. Whatever unresolved factual disputes exist will be handled at the trial court level whichever way SCOTUS decides. That's just one example of the slant in the article.
The article clearly paints the Moores with a skeptical brush, both with the "disputed facts" canard and with editorializing. Sentences such as this are clearly telling me what to think rather than telling me what happened: "The Moores are portrayed as sympathetic plaintiffs in Supreme Court briefs and a video posted on the webpage of the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute." How are they "portrayed" as "sympathetic" in briefs and in the video? Why would we ever expect plaintiffs not to be portrayed as such in their own briefs and public relations content? What purpose does this sentence serve, other than to have the reader draw a negative inference about the Moores?
The government's side of the the argument is given no such skepticism. A tax law professor and a GOP staffer who worked on the law each label a victory for the Moores as a "tsunami" and "enriched uranium," respectively, in the world of corporate tax law. NPR presents these without qualifications. These two experts constitute the vast majority of the expert opinion in the article; an expert favoring the Moores' interpretation is given a few sentences.
It ends with an accusation of hypocrisy against the US Chamber of Commerce: "As [GOP staffer] Callas caustically observes, for the chamber [US Chamber of Commerce] and other stakeholders years later "to discover constitutional concerns that they didn't raise before" strikes me as "opportunistic."" The law in question is 186 pages long. Isn't it possible - likely, even - that defects in the law exist which jeopardize the constitutionality of the law and, upon their discovery, groups which are organized against taxes might champion this position? I'm not sure how that counts as "opportunism," except insofar as the author is presenting a tendentious, slanted argument.
[0] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-ra...