Let's not get bogged down in the framing issue. I was at CNN when the TotalNEWS lawsuit was resolved. CNN and the other plaintifs have a usage rights disclaimer on all their content pages against the creation of derivative works.

A link to an article could be NO REASONABLE MEANS be considered a derivative work. The TotalNEWS suit wasn't about linkage. NPR is mudding the water by cojoining these different issues.

Framing a content site and selling advertising on top of someone else's content is a whole different manner. Something that CNN faught against successfully, as I'm sure NPR would also. (I'll leave the philosophical arguments about structure markup be definition not making assumptions about the display for someone else).