I don't really agree about "controlled by", that's like asking someone "who have you voted for" and after they said X, then saying "so you don't have any free will, you are just controlled by X". It's ridiculous: it's not because someone agrees with some party that the party controls them.

But being biased is not in itself a problem: every media is biased, only stupid people believe in neutrality. For example, giving 50-50 time to present each side's opinion is not unbiased: in a parallel universe where one side is, by chance, way bigger than the other (which is very easy to obtain as political trends are strongly based on charisma of few people), then, the 50-50 strategy leads to totally different coverage of the situation. The 50-50 strategy is not being neutral, it's being a sell-out that want to please everyone. Another example is these situations where the journalist gives equal share to a person that says "it's currently raining" and a person that says "it's currently sunny" (and, please, avoid "it can be raining and sunny at the same time", obviously, my example corresponds to a situation where it is not the case).

At the end of the day, it's not a problem: you have left-wing media, you have right-wing media, as long as they are not lying and that you don't have a society too stupid to live in an echo chamber, then, citizen are given all the information they need to make their own opinion. And if they are living in their echo chamber, the problem is not the existence of biased media, but a society problem.

But in this discussion, the problem is that the label is not "this company is ideologically biased", but "this company is controlled by the government". You cannot blame me for talking about the subject in question. The question of NPR being left-wing is irrelevant, but pushing this in the discussion is in fact even a problem: like if intellectually dishonest labeling are ok because NPR is left-wing.