RFE is openly intended as propaganda. NPR does not claim that. They're not the same thing.

There used to be Radio Moscow which in the 1980s was repeated from Havana on AM 1040 for a while. This overpowered 50,000 watt WHO 1040 from Des Moines, Iowa for some folks in the southeastern US. It was an international incident and made the nightly news repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Moscow

I think the weirdness comes from NPR's previous PR strategy of denying they even needed government funding. At the time (2 years ago?) I recall NPR wanted to convey that defunding was useless, and that their (national) news was only state-affiliated or government funded by 1%. I think they also wanted to obscure how they use funding to influence ideological content on local public radio stations.

I agree with you on the consolidation of media; we need less rich kingpins deciding what's newsworthy. But I disagree on the appeal of local stations. Except in times of local crisis, I've found their programming to be inferior to the national brands. Too many boring podcasts, LLM-like articles and lazy fact-checking.