NPR nearly went bankrupt, then got a record gift from McDonald's money
In 1983 America's public radio network ran up a deficit of nearly $7 million and came close to collapse. Twenty years later the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc left it over $200 million, the largest cash gift a cultural institution had ever received.
National Public Radio grew out of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, signed by Lyndon Johnson, which also produced PBS for television. It replaced an older educational radio network on February 26, 1970, starting with 30 staff and 90 member stations under its first president, Donald Quayle. Its first broadcast, on April 20, 1971, carried Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. All Things Considered followed that May, and Morning Edition arrived in November 1979, hosted by Bob Edwards. By 2018 the two drive-time shows each drew close to 15 million listeners a week.
The 1983 crisis came from an overambitious expansion. After a congressional inquiry and the resignation of president Frank Mankiewicz, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lent enough to stave off bankruptcy, on new terms. Federal money would now go to local stations, which would buy NPR programmes by subscription, and NPR's satellite service became a cooperative open to outside producers. Paying off the debt took roughly three years.
Joan Kroc's bequest in November 2003 lifted the 2004 budget by more than half, to $153 million, and roughly doubled an endowment that had stood at $35 million. NPR also spent nearly $13 million on a West Coast studio in Culver City, opened in 2002 partly as a backup should disaster strike Washington. It embraced podcasting in 2005; within a decade its own shows were downloaded 94 million times in a single month.
Money has never stopped being a worry. Corporate underwriting, 26% of the budget in 2009, falls whenever the economy does. The 2008 financial crisis brought a 7% staff cut and two cancelled programmes, and in 2023 about a tenth of employees were laid off when advertising shrank against an operating budget of roughly $300 million.
Source: NPR
