NPR is a non-profit organization. Although they need to play the advertising game to keep the lights on, they certainly aren't there to try and make big profits on their listeners.
Commercial radio is not like this.
Commercial radio is not like this.
I used to work at one of the largest NPR affiliate stations. Listener support is hugely important, most of the money we made came from listeners. IMHO, NPR is pretty successful in that they have built a model that supports quality journalism, at a decent scale, without a lot of annoyances for the user. Newspapers and other media orgs could stand to learn a lot.