Rural public media struggling in the face of funding cuts

We became aware this summer, when the Trump administration announced cuts to public broadcasting and the abolition of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that rural areas would be hit especially hard.  This is because rural stations are more reliant on federal funding.  Rural areas also tend to have fewer media outlets, which means that those supported by public dollars are less easily replaced by the private sector--including in the reporting on weather and natural disasters.    

This week, Reveal reported on the closure of a public radio station, KYUK, in the Bethel/Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.  Here's an excerpt: 

When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history.

“The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives,” said Sage Smiley, KYUK’s news director.

KYUK is small, scrappy, and bilingual. It broadcasts in English and Yugtun, the language of an Indigenous population that lives in villages along two massive rivers. The station airs NPR content, but also high school basketball games, local call-in talk shows, and even a show hosted by the volunteer search and rescue team, answering listeners’ questions about ice conditions and safety. The station is a lifeline for this unique region.

KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wiping out more than $1 billion in funding for public media.

For more on that typhoon in mid-October, see NPR's coverage here. 

On using localism to help save rural America

This is from Jeffrey Tyler Syck on Persuasion's Substack on Tuesday, Nov. 25, "Localism, Not Nationalism, Will Cure What Ails Rural America."  Syck, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Pikeville, in eastern Kentucky, frames his argument in relation to J.D. Vance's embrace of nationalism and his concomitant neglect of the local:  

The collapse of rural towns, small industrial cities, and remote farms has coincided with the decline of local cultures. A local identity brings with it pride of place and a certain willingness to live with the disadvantages endemic to the location. When people feel that their locality serves a purpose—that it is embedded within a larger whole—they are willing to tolerate or even embrace its remoteness, slower pace of life, and faulty infrastructure. Rural Americans once thrived on a belief that for all their region’s faults, they were the backbone of the nation.

But [J.D.] Vance’s concept of the nation does not restore this sense of local pride. Instead, it substitutes a globalized vision of tradition for a local one.

The proof surrounds me every day in my native Central Appalachia. As a child, most local businesses in my neighborhood seemed to identify first and foremost with East Kentucky. Many bore names like “commonwealth insurance” or “mountain music.” Though people in the region were patriotic, the primary emotional attachment was regional and not national.

Yet since Vance—and MAGA more broadly—have encouraged a strong dose of nationalism in red states, this has changed. Now when I cruise down the highway I am greeted by “Patriot RV” or “American Laundry and Cleaners.” This is a subtle but telling shift.

* * *

Champions of rural America must reject reactionary nationalist attempts to rewind the clock back to the 1950s. They need a totally new solution to rural malaise—one that combines the localism of the past with the values of the open society that will likely dominate the coming century. This is not an easy task; it asks us to combine two things that have not historically gone well together. Yet it is the only real hope for rural America.

How might it come about?

The first step is for government and civil society to rejuvenate local cultural institutions. For instance, in my native Eastern Kentucky we should work hard to make local newspapers a strong cultural force again. We should restore historical buildings and landscapes, beautifying cheap utilitarian constructions so that they fit with the vernacular culture, and preserve local environments. We should refurbish the folksy brick buildings native to this region, tearing down or renovating eyesores, and conserving the stunning Appalachian Mountains that are the physical home of my people. Perhaps most importantly, we should invest in local art, music, and culture. This could mean cultivating a serious appreciation for bluegrass music, Appalachian literature, and local history. Learning to appreciate the culture of one’s home is a guaranteed path to restoring a sense of purpose to the locality.

For more on "left-behind places" read this essay.  

A new angle on rural library closure, with a story out of central Washington

Library in Kingtson, Arkansas 2013

Major media outlets have published several rural library stories --most of them about the closure of rural libraries--in the past few years.  (Read some of them here). This latest, from the New York Times, is a bit more complex than most.  Anna Griffin reports form Tieton, Washington, population 1389, in Yakima County.  The headline is "Federal Cuts, Immigration Raids, and a Slowing Economy Hit Rural Libraries."  Here's the lede: 

Cole Leinbach, a librarian in Tieton, Wash., population 1,610, watched intently as a 7-year-old girl hunkered down with a book in a corner of the town’s one-room library. Her brother, 4, had opened a board game searching for potential toys. Their mother talked quietly on her phone in Spanish.

“This is what libraries are supposed to be,” he said, “just a place a mom can go with her kids for an hour to hang out and get some kind of enriching entertainment.”

But the Tieton library, which occupies a few hundred square feet in a side room at the city hall, is closing next month, a casualty of rising costs in Yakima County, Wash., shrinking help from Washington, D.C., financing decisions made decades ago and significant demographic change.

“I’ve had people come express dismay,” said Mr. Leinbach, who at 26 has been a librarian for about a year and a half. “A library is in a lot of ways a kind of civic symbol, a demonstration of a community’s commitment to itself. So what does it mean if that goes away?”

* * * 

That is a question a growing number of communities, many of them in Republican states, will be facing soon. In March, President Trump issued an executive order dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has provided around $270 million a year to public and academic libraries to help pay for services such as summer reading programs, broadband internet access, lending between libraries, staff training and access to national databases.

Don't miss the rest of the Tieton, Washington story here.  

New book: Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice

Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice Research is published today by Bloomsbury.  The co-editors of this anthology are Michele Statz and Daniel Newman.  A synopsis follows: 

This book offers a unique look at rural access to justice through a series of personal and professional reflections by leading scholars in the field.

Engaging a “position sensibility”, it explores how our identities, class backgrounds, and professional privileges shape research and writing in rural places-and how those rural places in turn shape us.

This is an important collection, for while rural justice gaps are well-documented, considerably less has been written about the distinct opportunities that rural communities present for collaborative research, innovation, and policy development. The book offers us an honest, reflexive accounting of what has been done, why, and what's next to dismantle academic barriers and promote meaningful work on rural access to justice.

As a call to still deeper engagement with rurality, this book will inspire readers to consider rural place in their studies of law-and to consider their own place in scholarship on access to justice.

Here's the Table of Contents; as you will see, it includes many notable scholars of rural legal scholarship: 

1. Introduction, Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State University, American Bar Foundation , USA) 

2. Claiming the South, Elizabeth Chambliss (University of South Carolina, USA)

3. From the Valleys to the Academy, Daniel Newman (Cardiff University UK)
4. Improving Access...Delivering Justice? Insights from Empirical Legal Research on (Rural) Access to Justice, Leslie S Ferraz (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
5. Indigenous Communities and Reparative Reflexivity in Socio-legal Studies, Brieanna Watters (University of Minnesota, USA)
6. Considerations of Access to Justice in the Context of Disaster, Kyle Mulrooney (University of New England, Australia), Marg Camilleri (Federation University Australia), Joseph F Donnermeyer (Ohio State University, USA) and Alistair Harkness (University of New England, Australia)
7. An Escape to Rurality, Maybell Romero (Tulane University, USA)
8. The Language of a Place, Michele Statz (University of Minnesota, USA)
9. The Slain South African Police Officer's Legacy Lives on: A Rural Criminologist's History, Witness Maluleke (University of Limpopo, South Africa)
10. Race, Rurality, and Marginalisation in the American South, Lauren Sudeall (Vanderbilt University, USA)
11. 'Do What Has to Be Done': How the Codes We Live By Shape Rural Access to Justice, Hillary Wandler (University of Montana, USA)
12. My Past is My Present: Teaching in and Writing about a Home Community, Hannah Haksgaard (University of South Dakota, USA)
13. Legal Pluralism and Human Rights Concerns, Wilfredo Ardito (Pontifical Catholic University
of Peru)
14. The Importance of Place in Law and Society, Mark Fathi Massoud (University of California, USA)

Farm Bureau skirts Obamacare (ACA) requirements on health plans

The Washington Post story is here, under the headline, "More states are offering cheap health plans to farmers, with a catch."  The lede follows:  

For years, Indiana farmer Corina Brant found herself squeezed on health care. Unable to qualify for Affordable Care Act subsidies, she worked an extra job that took her away from her farm duties.

That all changed in 2021, when she bought a policy for herself and her family under the Indiana Farm Bureau. It’s one of the growing number of states that allow these agencies — which lobby on behalf of farmers — to sell policies underwritten by large insurers such as UnitedHealthcare. The laws are modeled after a decades-old Tennessee statute that allows a state farm bureau to sell health coverage to farmers.

The catch: While these policies are inexpensive, they come with major restrictions. The plans cover checkups and most medical procedures, but they aren’t required to cover applicants with preexisting conditions or maintain coverage for someone who becomes seriously ill. In that sense, they resemble the cheap short-term plans that the Trump administration has pushed as a private-market alternative to the ACA. Critics call them “junk plans,” while proponents say they expand affordable options to an underserved group.

Rural K-12 education deficits draw (at least) momentary attention from New York Times

Jessica Grose of the New York Times wrote earlier this week about the plight of rural schools.  The headline is "Rural Kids Need More than Vocational School."  Her newsletter was inspired by Beth Macy's new book, Paper Girl, which claims to be about rural America--broadly defined.  In the book, Macy takes up some rural K-12 education deficits, and she cites the work of Prof. Catharine Biddle of the University of Maine.  

[Biddle] explained that while [a range of wraparound] services are also in demand in high-need urban and suburban districts, it’s a particular challenge to offer them in rural America. Most school systems run on economies of scale and a per-student funding model; it poses a great challenge to provide wraparound services to districts with fewer students who have a lot of needs and who are also spread out. Rural districts already face a teacher shortage, and earlier this year, the federal Department of Education cut funding to teacher training programs that might have helped alleviate some of those shortages.

In one paper Biddle wrote, where she spoke to over 100 educators in rural Maine about how they dealt with children with adverse childhood experiences, a teacher mentioned that the school nurse is on site just once a month, and that teachers feel as if they are acting as ad hoc social workers on a daily basis.

Thus, Grose's column, among other things, points out is the spatial inequality between rural and urban.  Other not-so-distant NYT attention to rural educational deficits is here (NYT Magazine 2021).  

Ro Khanna talks "Epstein class" in relation to rural and working-class unrest

David Leonhardt interviewed U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna on the NYT opinion podcast yesterday under the headline, "The Democrat Who Split MAGA Over the Epstein Files."  Khanna styles himself an economic populist, and he has paid a lot of attention recent years to spatial inequality and the ways in which rural and rural-ish communities have been hurt by U.S. trade policies of recent years.  That is, he takes seriously the woes of places often styled as "left behind," including rural ones.  (Here's a December 2022 post about Khanna's interest in rural America).  

In this interview with Leonhardt, Khanna talks about his collaboration with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie to push for the release of the Epstein files.  The quotes below, all from Khanna, link rural and working class agitation that drew them to Trump to their discontent with the so-called "Epstein class."  

Khanna: I have been going on podcasts to argue for my economic patriotism agenda — an agenda that says we’ve got to focus on factory towns that have been hollowed out in rural communities. I was going and visiting these communities, and so I was on Theo Von’s podcast and I was on the “Flagrant” podcast and I was going to places like Johnstown, Pa., and going to places like Warren, Ohio. When I was there, the issue would come up about the “Epstein class” — that’s what they called it. They said, well, are you on the side of the forgotten Americans or on the side of the Epstein class?

I realized how much the abuse by rich and powerful men of young girls and the sense of a rape island that Epstein had set up for people embodied the corruption of government. And then many of them saw Donald Trump as fighting this corrupt government and standing up for forgotten Americans. And this was the symbol for the most disgusting abuse and corruption of our government. And so when the issue came up that Pam Bondi said that there was nothing to release, I knew that this was a betrayal of the core promise that Trump had made to MAGA voters.

I said, we should push for the release. And I put out some tweet initially and then we introduced a bill. Then Massie and I have worked together for years; we have a real friendship. He called me and he said: Well, why don’t we try to collaborate on this instead of just doing something partisan? And I think we can reshape the coalition.

In the process, I then met the survivors and when I met the survivors, then it became personal. I mean, these are women who are talking about being raped at the age of 14 and being told to recruit other junior high and high school students. I think I had the same experience that Marjorie Taylor Greene or Nancy Mace or Thomas Massie had — once you meet these survivors, I mean, it’s just one of the most horrific crimes in our country’s history.

* * *

And once these files are released, people can judge for themselves the abusive conditions of those young girls. But one of the survivors really struck me and said, “Ro, I don’t remember what happened to me, and I want to see the files to understand the trauma I went through.” And for these survivors, some of them voted for Trump. It’s not personal. In fact, we’re having a press conference and one of the asks of the survivors will be to meet with Donald Trump to have these files released. But anyone who meets them realizes that, look, there were over a thousand victims. The idea that only two people would be doing this with a thousand victims just doesn’t make sense. I mean, it’s more than Epstein and Maxwell. It’s a symbol for the recklessness of an elite that could do things without impunity.

* * *

It gave me a sense of how deep it went. I didn’t really follow the details. Now, there is a whole island of people with a thousand-plus victims abused so that the scale of it, it resonated. And it occurred to me how many people view this as the central example of the corruption of their own government. And many of them had said — look, they thought that there were more Democrats than Republicans involved. I think that’s probably because of Trump’s messaging. And I don’t believe that to be the case, I think it’s widespread, but that was the sentiment. And so the emotional power of it is something that I grasped only because I was in these communities. I was on these podcasts and I was talking to people in the MAGA base.

* * *

And I would often say to people, after I go into these communities, when I was in Aliquippa or Johnstown, I said, if I was in one of those communities, I’d vote everyone out too. Why wouldn’t you? Those towns have been abandoned for 40 years and it’s not just the working class.

I think this is one of the places that Democrats make a mistake — it’s not just the person who’s making $13 an hour who should be making $15 or $17 or $20 an hour. It’s people who are doctors or who are lawyers or who are small-business owners who think their entire communities have been hollowed out. The pride is gone. Their jobs were shipped overseas. They see districts like mine that are succeeding. They think they built America and a governing class has abandoned them. And Trump evoked that sentiment and he said, I’m going to tear down this corrupt system. I would often say, well, what we need to do is build things up. But they said, well, your party is not even understanding what needs to be torn down.

The Epstein class often became Exhibit 1 in what they thought that the status quo had protected, and didn’t care enough about. So I think it’s deeper than just the economics. It was this sense that these people feel and felt they were losing their country.

* * *

I did not know, in full honesty, where the MAGA base would go because one of the things — having just been to so many small towns, rural communities, factory towns for the past nine years — that I think we don’t understand is the emotional connection that Trump built with these communities because he was one of the first people to say, you got shafted, you got screwed and I’m going to bring back your pride.

And so they give him a lot of latitude because they think he was the first to emotionally speak to their ambition and their pain and their hopes. But what started to happen is, as we built momentum for this, I started to see commentators first in the MAGA base say: “You know what? This is really important. This is core to what Trump ran on.”

New survey shows (some) rural Americans more optimistic than their urban counterparts

The AP reported yesterday on a new survey from the American Communities Project that shows, among other findings, that certain rural Americans--those living in counties the survey designers designate "Rural Middle America" are more optimistic than the average American.  Here's the part of the AP story about rural optimism: 

Rising optimism in rural areas, despite economic anxiety

Rural residents are feeling more upbeat about the country’s trajectory — even though most aren’t seeing Trump’s promised economic revival.

The $15 price tag on a variety pack of Halloween candy at the Kroger supermarket last month struck Carl Gruber. Disabled and receiving federal food aid, the 42-year-old from Newark, Ohio, had hardly been oblivious to lingering, high supermarket prices.

But Gruber, whose wife also is unable to work, is hopeful about the nation’s future, primarily in the belief that prices will moderate as Trump suggests.

“Right now, the president is trying to get companies who moved their businesses out of the country to move them back,” said Gruber, a Trump voter whose support has wavered over the federal shutdown that delayed his monthly food benefit. “So, maybe we’ll start to see prices come down.”

About 6 in 10 residents of Rural Middle America — Newark’s classification in the survey — say they are hopeful about the country’s future over the next few years, up from 43% in the 2024 ACP survey. Other communities, like heavily evangelical areas or working-class rural regions, have also seen an uptick in optimism.

Kimmie Pace, a 33-year-old unemployed mother of four from a small town in northwest Georgia, said, “I have anxiety every time I go to the grocery store.”

But she, too, is hopeful in Trump. “Trump’s in charge, and I trust him, even if we’re not seeing the benefits yet,” she said.

It's important to note that not all rural or nonmetro counties are designated "Rural Middle America", and I'd say the lion's share of the counties in that category are in the Midwest. Many are in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, with a few in coastal states, including New York, Washigton and Oregon.  Many nonmetro counties, including my home county in Arkansas are designated "Evangelical Hubs" and others--as in New England--are designated "Graying America."  You can find the cool color-coded map here.  And here's a chart showing the movement in attitudes from all groups.  It shows Native Americans as even more optimistic than "Rural Middle America."   Optimism also rose among other groups associated with rurality, including "Evangelical Hubs", "Aging Farmland", "Working-Class Country" and "Exurbs."   

You can read more about the methodology for assigning counties to the various categories here.  

Postscript:  On Nov. 20, Newsweek published this story about rural-urban difference in the survey.   I'll feature a few posts from that story here.  First, this is from Shannon Monnat, President Elect of the Rural Sociological Society and Director of the Center for Public Policy Reform at Syracuse University:   

Rural communities tend to be concerned with "cultural recognition, respect, and visibility," Mon " nat said, as many have experienced "long-term economic losses, population aging, poor health, and weakening local institutions," so she added that when their daily life is "shaped by these challenges, national politics can become a symbolic arena where people seek affirmation.

It's also important to remember that rural communities "vary tremendously in their economies, the types of people who live in them, and political orientations," Monnat said, so not all rural communities will feel the same.

* * * 

"Painting these results as rural versus urban masks the diversity within nonmetropolitan counties, which make up the vast majority of counties in the U.S.," Carrie Henning-Smith, a professor of health policy and management at the University of Minnesota, told Newsweek.

* * * 

"Some parts of rural America are thriving, while other parts face significant challenges both now and in the future," Kenneth Johnson, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, told Newsweek.

* * * 

However, in other areas, rural counties are depopulating, meaning they reached their peak population decades ago and have now lost around 25 percent of that population, Johnson said.

This is partly because in "the majority of rural counties, more people die than are born each year," as "access to health care is more limited," he added. It is also because many rural areas are losing young adults to urban areas and cities, he said.

Finally, I am quoted regarding Democrats' disinvestment in the rural vote.  

Calls to divide California into two states revived after passage of Prop 50

California Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) is again pushing to split the state into two, re-energized by the recent passage of Proposition 50 (read more here and here).  Gallagher, who recently stepped away from his role as minority leader of the State Assembly, spoke at a meeting of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Nov. 6, two days after the election.  Here's a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle coverage of Gallagher's comments indicating that  

the passage of Prop. 50 was a “catalyst” for him to reintroduce a resolution that would form a new state out of multiple dissatisfied California counties. The proposed new 51st American state would sever the entirety of more rural inland California from the coast.

“Let’s not discount ourselves in what this Inland California is actually really capable of,” Gallagher said while speaking at the podium during the board meeting. “... I think we can do it a lot better than the [government] that is currently controlled by the coastal representatives.”

Gallagher, who used to serve on the Sutter County board before he was elected to the state Assembly in 2014, blames coastal cities for taking tax dollars away from inland California –– including the Central Valley, Northern California and the Inland Empire. As a result, Gallagher said from behind the podium on Thursday, issues such as water, wolves, wildfire mitigation, and “skyrocketing utility and gas bills” have been put on the back burner.  

It's interesting that Gallagher is focused on tax dollars going from inland California to the benefit of the coast.  It'd be interesting to see the data on that since most people assume that urban California taxs subsidize rural California.  As I've written recently here, I'm not sure that thinking of who is benefitting from whom in terms of taxes is the most useful frame.  Not all of the benefits urban California gets from rural California--and vice versa--can be reduced to revenue.  

Greatest protest against Prop 50 in California from state's northeast corner

California voters passed Proposition 50--the law that dramatically gerrymandered the state's Congressional districts--by a wide margin (64% to 36%) on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 4.   Here's the county-level map of the vote, where you can see that the most intense opposition was in the far northeastern part of the state, in Modoc (population 8,700) and Lassen (population 32,730) counties.   Read more coverage here from CalMatters, here from KRON4 News out of San Francisco, and here from Eyewitness News 7, dateline Auburn California.  This post from a few weeks ago collects coverage of the proposition from earlier this fall, and this one from late August also explores the proposition through a ruralist lens. 

I'll be writing more soon about post-election responses to the vote, especially from rural California.  

NYT's Thomas Edsall on the current food stamp controversy, including rural and racial differences

Thomas Edsall's column in the New York Times this week is under the provocative headline, "It Would be Trump's Honor to Pay for Food Stamps."  Here's the part of Edsall's column that mentions rural Americans:  

In “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy,” the coauthors Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown point out that while urban and rural counties relied on government transfer programs at similar rates in the 1970s and 1980s,

They diverged from the 1990s onward as rural places faced economic tumult and residents came to rely more on government benefits. By 2019, the eve of the pandemic, rural people benefited from social transfers by $1,749 more per person per year than their urban peers.

In 1970, Mettler and Brown calculated, rural and urban households received social benefits of $2,220 and $2,244, respectively, a 1.1 percent difference. By 2019, the average annual government benefit for rural residents rose to $10,558 and for urban residents to $8,809, a 20 percent difference. 

Mettler and Brown cite research by Jennifer Sherman, a sociologist at Washington State University, to describe the agonized struggle of the rural poor who, when faced with a major economic setback, are forced to turn to government for help:

When they themselves need to use such benefit, they experience a deep sense of stigma and shame. They drove to stores far away to use SNAP benefits, hoping to avoid the gaze of their neighbors and community members.

Given the way people have traditionally talked about these programs, one of the most striking things about government data on SNAP use is just how high the white share of food stamp recipients actually is.

In West Virginia, 97.7 percent of SNAP recipients whose racial and ethnic identity was recorded are white; Indiana, 66 percent; Iowa 75.5 percent; Kentucky, 83.4 percent; Missouri, 67.1 percent; Montana, 76.6 percent; North Dakota, 66.9 percent; Ohio, 64.9; Oklahoma, 60.9 percent; Utah, 86.6 percent; and Wyoming, 78.8 percent.

On this issue of "white share of food stamp recipients" I am pleased to see Edsall note that.  It's an issue I've often foregrounded, along with the fact that middle class folks who are resentful of those who receive public benefits are as resentful as the whites who do so as they are of the people of color who do so. The resentment is not driven by racism, certainly not solely so.  The intra-racial tension is as significant as the inter-racial tension.  Read more here and here.