NPR is a federation of smaller public radio stations. The quality of content under the NPR banner is a broad spectrum: they have good stories and they have some that are crap - biased editorials costumed as objective journalism.
NPR stories on average tend to be higher quality than corporate media news, but I think 'accepted paragon' is quite superlative, out of touch, and lacking imagination.
Second off, this is absolutely not accepted fact and they have a lot of controversy, both in their lack of neutral point of view as a government-funded media sources, as well as their coverage of corporate sponsors. NPR is not the American BBC.
NPR stories on average tend to be higher quality than corporate media news, but I think 'accepted paragon' is quite superlative, out of touch, and lacking imagination.