[viaken]

It would be trivial to write a script to scrape text.npr.org and send it to you.

Or you can just visit it, I suppose.

[MaxBarraclough]

Firefox and Safari each have a 'Reader Mode' which does exactly what you want: presenting a web-page in the absence of any web design.

It's really the ultimate condemnation of modern web design that this feature is so useful.

Edit: won't help the data-consumption though, as I believe it can only be enabled after the page has loaded

[setzer22]

In reply to your edit. You can use something like umatrix to block almost everything (even css) and reader mode will still work, I do this for most newspapers and works quite well.