North Cook News

Former Illinois House District 17 candidate Jim Geldermann supports President Donald Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS, arguing that taxpayer funding compromises journalistic independence and enables political bias. 

The executive order, titled “Ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media,” calls for public funds to support “only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” with implications for stations across Illinois, including WTTW and WBEZ Chicago, which also owns the Chicago Sun-Times.

“I do not believe a journalistic organization should be receiving funding from organizations it is supposedly reporting on,” Geldermann told the North Cook News. “It is the government’s funding that threatens freedom of the press.”

Geldermann, a Northbrook resident and president of the software firm Wireless.dev Corporation, ran as the Republican candidate for Illinois House District 17 in the 2024 general election but lost to Democratic incumbent Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz.

Geldermann’s concerns echo those raised by former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner, who recently resigned from the organization after publishing a scathing op-ed in The Free Press titled "How NPR lost America's trust."

Berliner accused NPR of abandoning balanced journalism, promoting a narrow progressive worldview, and ignoring stories inconvenient to its ideological slant—such as the Hunter Biden laptop story—while advancing narratives like the now-discredited Trump-Russia collusion claims.

The Chicago Sun-Times has defended the $2 million annual federal subsidy received by its parent organization, NPR affiliate Chicago Public Media, noting that “freedom of the press is under threat.”

But Geldermann directly rejected that framing asserting that editorial independence is undermined when media outlets depend on public dollars.

“It is the government’s funding that threatens freedom of the press,” he said.

Trump’s directive followed a congressional hearing in which NPR CEO Katherine Maher admitted the network had avoided covering stories that could politically damage Democrats. 

Maher, a former head of Wikipedia and current board member of Signal, has also drawn criticism for past statements questioning the value of the First Amendment and Western norms of free expression.

In a recent congressional hearing, NPR CEO Katherine Maher admitted the network had avoided stories that could be politically damaging to Democrats while emphasizing others critical of Republicans, regardless of their accuracy.

Maher was also confronted about past social media posts reflecting controversial left-wing views including her 2020 assertion that “America is addicted to white supremacy,” that the concept of a “free and open” Internet was a “white male Westernized construct” and Trump is a “deranged racist sociopath.” 

Geldermann added that NPR and PBS don’t just reflect a particular worldview—they actively promote it while suppressing dissenting voices.

“It isn’t a question of representing, but they actively promote their view while suppressing opposing views,” he said. “It is one thing to do this on the editorial page, but it is an egregious failure of ethics when the editors allow news stories to include adjectives that subtly skew the story to an editorial.” 

It was recently revealed that NPR’s D.C. newsroom includes 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans, raising concerns over political imbalance and ideological homogeneity.

“I personally stopped watching PBS News over 30 years ago because of the editorializing of its news broadcasts,” he said. “Name-calling shows a lack of ethics and willingness to engage in expressing differing ideas.”

He urged readers to approach mainstream news reporting with caution. 

“Caveat emptor whenever reading a news story,” he said. “If there are adjectives used, you will know the reporter’s bias.”

The Media Research Center praised the defunding measure, calling NPR and PBS the “TV and radio equivalent to MSNBC” out of step with the values of many taxpayers. 

Rapid Response 47, a grassroots conservative network, went further, accusing the organizations of spreading “radical, woke propaganda.”