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. 

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.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLIX): Rural life in "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich

I've very much enjoyed Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Mighty Red (2024), set in the farming exurbs near Fargo, North Dakota, along the Red River.  I'm going to share some excerpts here that reflect on small-town life.  The protagonist is Kismet Poe, a high school senior when the story begins in 2008.  Her mother is Crystal, a Native American.   

Early in the novel, Kismet marries Gary, the somewhat hapless scion of a local sugar beet farming empire. She does this even though she is in love with another young man, the brilliant high-school drop out, Hugo.  Also looming over the novel, Gary has an ominous secret that gets revealed close to the novel's end.  Along the way, we get some vignettes that provide incisive commentary on small-town life.  Indeed, the entire novel is about a community entirely involved in each others' business. 

Also of note are Erdrich's ruminations on farming and different ways of being in relation to the natural world.  I'll save most of those for a separate post.  

In this opening scene, Gary and Kismet are out driving.

However, within a mile or two, Gary’s question whether she was bored made the silence complicated and exposed the fact that she actually was bored, very bored, and being consciously bored reminded her of what her cynical best friend, Stockton, had said—how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept. She wasn’t drunk now. She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.  (p. 13) 

Kismet wanted to forestall Gary from sharing his thoughts. He might get solemn and talk about his farming ideas or his philosophy, which was that you should do what your mother told you to do. Kismet had met Gary’s mother and she questioned that. Gary believed that radio frequencies could carry disease. He started many sentences by declaring ‘There are two kinds of people . . .’ He didn’t believe in God but said he could get behind the idea that aliens had manufactured the skein of life. He also talked about, say, the Ten Commandments, and would wonder whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to deer. He loved deer. He cried when he saw a dead one. He also cried when he saw a living one. This was a thing about Gary that really got to Kismet. He didn’t hunt. His father and uncle tried to take him out hunting. He refused. He loved animals, not only deer, but every animal. Still, she didn’t appreciate it when he said that she reminded him of a deer in winter with her dark brown eyes and matching hair. Deer were lovely creatures but they were prey animals. 

College will get me out of here, thought Kismet, and a tiny rush of fear made her want to sleep. She pushed her seat back. The sun was beaming through the windshield and it was autumn sun, the mellow light of early afternoon. She fell into a dreamy nap as Gary meditated aloud about whether dinosaur bones were real or had been placed there by a super-intelligent race of ancient humans, or by aliens. ‘Aliens again,’ she murmured. 

‘Damn straight,’ said Gary in a heroic voice. 

‘You know the bones are real,’ said Kismet. 

‘Probably,’ said Gary. ‘Here’s the turnoff to that place. Remember Blosnik? He was a hands-on man. There’s two kinds—’ 

‘I know,’ said Kismet. ‘Your mom and dad . . .’ ‘

Yeah, Winnie and Diz.’  

He liked calling them by their first names. 

‘They always say there are two kinds of people, hands-on and hands-off. They really liked how Blosnik took our class out to dig fossils—’  (p. 13-14)

This scene from one of Gary's days at high school, when he is upset about something a teacher has said to him about Gary's still unrevealed secret:      

He knew that Kismet had social studies during third period. He paused outside her classroom. Instantly, his breath slowed and his heart calmed. There was something mysterious and magical about Kismet and dating her helped Gary feel sane. He suspected it was her Indian, oops, Native American, blood—though he never mentioned it again after the first time. Gary was awed by her effect on him, but for most of the years he’d gone to school with her she just seemed weird.  (p. 24) 

On Kismet and her relationship with her mother, especially when Kismet went through a goth phase: 

Like all mothers and daughters, both Kismet and Crystal went through Kismet’s phases. Before she took a job and cleaned up her act, Kismet was a goth, a dollar-store goth, but wasn’t that the point? One bleary night she self-dyed her shiny hair a harsh lusterless blue-black, set off her narrow eyes with thick black lines, and brushed her eyelids with gradations of purple and maroon. Crystal didn’t react when Kismet came downstairs the next morning and went to school. So she upped the ante. Tried to be secretive about her stick and poke tattoos. Kismet and Martin had memorized some of their namesake Edgar Allan’s work. Crystal caught a glimpse of the word nevermore on Kismet’s shoulder blade and a raven that came out looking like a pigeon. She pretended not to notice. In truth, she was depressed about it for weeks. Kismet’s clothes were from rummage sales or Thrifty Life, all black of course. Some she shredded artfully, others were ripped or worn thin already. Kismet was sent home for the slashes beneath her butt that went too high and showed violet panties. She was sent home again for sneaking out of the house wearing a T-shirt printed with fake breasts including nipples—she’d found the T-shirt in a garbage can. 

‘Stop wearing garbage!’ Crystal yelled at her. She was on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. schedule and had been roused from crucial sleep by the call from the principal.

‘All we can afford is garbage,’ Kismet said.

This stung and Crystal teared up. Kismet got all hangdog and mumbled she was sorry. (p. 25) 

What follows next speaks to the community and lack-of-anonymity themes.  It has Winne, Gary's mom, arriving at book club--a book club in which it seems every other woman in the novel--and perhaps in their town--is a member:    

[Winnie] turned into Bev’s drive. She cut the engine, but her hands were stuck to the wheel. The others lived in Tabor and saw one another all of the time. She had gone to school with Bev, though, and stayed friends with her. Bev had been a Pavlecky before she’d married Ichor. Bev would stick up for her. Still, Winnie Geist sat outside in her car. She’d arrived early to the book club and had to gather her courage before facing the women who would walk into Bev’s house. This was only the second meeting she’d made it to since the accident, and at the first meeting she hadn’t said a word. So she needed to see who was coming before she entered.

Many women she knew from church would be at the book club meeting. She knew that some actually prayed for her and her family. But on dark days Winnie believed that some prayed against her. She found it hard to bear the sting of their eyes when they’d watch her enter a room, and it was even more difficult to open her mouth and speak. (p. 84-85) 

Here's a scene following Kismet and Gary's wedding, which takes place shortly after Kismet's father and Crystal's long-time partner, Martin, runs off with the local Catholic parish's building fund, also leaving Crystal's home mortgaged without her knowledge.  That gives rise to the need for a lawyer, a very unusual event for folks of such modest means in rural-ish North Dakota: 

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip. She drank until the champagne stopped thought, stopped taste, stopped emotion. People whirled, talking in her face. People watched from the sides of the room. They were talking about her, talking about her father, trying to corner Crystal, who eluded them all. 

After a brutal set of photos, Kismet’s mother squeezed her arm and said that she had to leave. Early. 

‘Are you going to see a lawyer?’ said Kismet. 

‘Oh, honey, yes,’ said Crystal. 

They wrapped each other in a silent hug with eyes squeezed shut. Getting a lawyer? It had never happened to them. It was as apocalyptic as Kismet getting married. They hugged harder, trying not to cry. Everybody looked away. (pp. 126-127) 

What follows is a scene from very near the end of the book, where the women's book group gathers again, this time to discuss Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

There followed a pleasurable babble containing many theories: nuclear winter, the Rapture, aliens, the flu, ozone holes, this thing about the climate, which split members off in subarguments, China conquers us, Russia conquers us, or maybe . . . Tania White waited patiently so that her theory was the last. She stood up and with a smile of satisfaction unrolled a chart of the Yellowstone volcano, the probable epicenter of destruction, as well as the outlying circles of poisonous gas and falling ash. 

‘So we have here the super-volcano. You see the red circle? Kill zone. Right here, this is us. In the pink zone. We’re in the primary ash zone. The secondary ash zone is this peach circle from Lake Superior over to California, taking in the Texas Panhandle. If this volcano erupted, and I guess it’s overdue, we get covered in volcano ash. It would be another ice age. Everything in the Upper Midwest would die—just like in the book—only a few random apples left—just like in the book,’ said Tania. She paused for maximum effect and tag-teamed Tory, who rose and spoke. ‘This is why we wanted to bring it to the club. This book is a very realistic look at the aftermath of the Yellowstone super-volcano.’ 

‘I’ve read where an asteroid is more likely to hit,’ said Mary Sotovine. 

‘You guys are way off the mark,’ said Winnie, pointing out the window, at the fields. ‘Look. There’s your answer.’ 

The women leaned sideways or forward to stare out the picture window and saw that, as usual, the wind was sending up curls of earth dust and dust devils were crisscrossing the fields. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Tory. 

Across the horizon a band of gray dust wavered. The sun would go down in a bloody stew. Every night was like the end of the world. It was gorgeous! ‘What is going to happen?’ said Mrs. Flossom, excitedly. ‘What can we expect?’ Jeniver went over to the table and opened another bottle of white and one of red. Even Karleen had a few sips. 

‘Don’t you see?’ said Winnie. ‘Every time you look out the window there’s dust rising up.

That’s dirt. We are losing our dirt. No dirt, no food.’ ‘Okay,’ said Karleen, eyes glittering. ‘Round that out for us.’ ‘No dirt, no food, no life. General starvation. My parents’ fields were surrounded by shelterbelts and they left stubble in their fields the way Pavlecky does now. They planted cover crops, but . . . sorry . . . I did some historic reading before Diz and I went to Russia years ago and it curdled my bones. When Stalin made the little farms into humungous collective farms . . .’ ‘

Like the sugar beet collective?’ someone asked. 

‘That’s a voluntary collective and a functional one,’ said Winnie, with a hint of scorn. ‘In Russia it was total and complete retooling where the Soviets kicked out . . . well, starved and murdered, all the landowners and farmers who were growing the wheat and turnips and food crops. Then they tried to organize giant farms, but nobody knew how to farm because most of the farmers-in-charge were dead! It was like when Stalin killed the doctors in Moscow, then he dies because there’s nobody to save him!’

‘Let’s get back to—’ Bev started. 

Winnie blew right past her. ‘Anyway, let’s say present practices continue in our case. No dirt. Nothing to eat.’ 

‘Except people,’ said Jeniver with a stern, conclusive nod all around, as if they were on The Road or on a lifeboat, ready to draw lots. Karleen shrank back. Jeniver’s brown hair, held on top of her head by a small golden sword, flashed in the bloody sunset light. 

‘Correct,’ said Winnie, though Jeniver had stolen her punch line. Winnie nodded her head and looked down into her fuchsia lap. ‘Starving, that’s a bad way to go. You don’t just fade out. Extremely painful, and the cravings! One of the worst . . .’ 

‘Not as bad as—’ Mary Sotovine began like a pitcher winding up. 

‘Let’s not go there,’ Darva cut in. 

Once Mary and Darva began competing over worst-case ways to perish, the book club usually spiraled into ghoulish hysteria. Mary’s glowing round face flattened in disappointment. 

‘How about getting pickled?’ Jeniver wondered. 

The other women looked at Jeniver and she held out her empty wineglass. 

‘Oh, pickled!’ The general mood shifted. 

‘Wasn’t that last line of the book really beautiful?’ said Tiny Johnson, and the book discussion was soon complete, except that suddenly Bev stood up. 

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘While we’ve been talking about the end of the world like we’re looking forward to it, I’ve been thinking how the world as we know, used to know, it really is ending. I thought of what the world was like even when I was a kid, how it was more . . . it was more full.’ 

‘Last call,’ said Tiny. ‘I’m bringing out the ice cream.’ 

‘Don’t you remember?’ Bev went on. ‘How there used to be meadowlarks?’ She looked around. ‘C’mon, when’s the last time you heard a meadowlark? You know, our state bird. When I was growing up they were everywhere, in all the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town they started. Am I right?’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Mary Sotovine. ‘I’m older, so ten years before Bev remembers, they were in the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town. You’d hear them all the time.’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Winnie. ‘There used to be flocks of those cedar birds, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds, even. And bugs, which they ate. Grasshoppers. Mayflies when you went out to the lakes. Now you don’t even see grasshoppers. And there’s only a mayfly or two. It’s the pesticides.’ 

All of the women suddenly began to talk. 

‘Do you notice how you look at the grille of your car and there’s no bugs? No bugs hit your windshield? And moths. How they used to swirl in the streetlamps?’ 

‘They did. Like snow.’ 

‘And how when it rained the frogs came out and they were everywhere and the grass was thick with frogs?’ ‘Toads. You could always go out and pick up a toad.’ 

‘Now it’s surprising. A toad! It’s special!’ 

‘And there were nighthawks, lots of nighthawks swerving around, after the mosquitoes. And bats everywhere and how we used to scream if they dived at us. And flocks of pigeons on the grain elevators.’

‘What does it mean that prairie falcons are living in town?’ asked Stockton. 

Everyone fell silent. 

‘It means there’s less to eat in the country,’ said Winnie. 

Kismet waved her hand. Winnie recognized her with a nod and called out, ‘Kismet has something to say!’ 

Kismet looked at her mother and said, ‘I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. McCarthy’s not afraid of that. And it’s a brutal adventure book—exciting when they find the food cache, and then there’s that cannibal army.’ 

Jeniver stood up and spoke with urgency. ‘This book is about what’s most important. You know, this kind of love between a parent and a child.’ 

Crystal put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and Kismet leaned on her mother. Winnie saw that Kismet would leave. She thought of Gary and started to cry, wondering how she could possibly save him. All of a sudden she had a thought that dried her tears right up. She’d searched for a way to thank Gary’s angel. Well, Kismet was his angel. Oh no! Oh yes! Again she wept. Bev thought about how Hugo had escaped that terrifying pre-apocalyptic landscape [the Bakken oil fields of western North Dakota], and she also started to cry. ...  Mary Sotovine was moved to tears at the thought of the days when she’d see bluebirds in a strip of grassland, now planted in soybeans.  (pp. 328-332). 

Cutbacks to public media likely to hurt rural communities the most

The disporportionate impact that federal funding cuts to public media will have on rural communities has been a theme of several publications in recent weeks, all in the run up Congress' vote to do just that--take back $1.1 billion previously allocated in support of public media.  

The first item I want to highlight is this July 11, 2025 episode of The Daily (New York Times audio), "Is Congress about to Kill this Local Radio Station?"  It discusses the likely impact of the proposed cuts on a public radio station, KFSK, in Petersburg, Alaska, population 3,000, in the southeast part of the state.  Jessica Cheung of The Daily sets up the interview with KFSK Station Manager Tom Abbott:    

Small rural stations, like KFSK, rely on federal funding to exist. And in a town like Petersburg, that is conservative, a town that voted for Trump by almost two to one in the last election, people are grappling with the Republican Party that is now trying to defund an important resource within the community — a radio station that a lot of people love. So I wanted to talk to Tom about what that’s been like, what’s at stake, and just what a station like KFSK offers people.

They start with a discussion of the place, including its beauty, economy, wildlife, and remoteness. 

Tom Abbott:  We also don’t have any chain stores here. Everything is mom and pop. Even though if you go to the post office, you’ll see a lot of Amazon boxes coming across the counter, because on occasion, there are things that can’t be found here, just because it’s a small market and it’s a small community. And that’s what brings us back around. radio. That’s why there’s only public radio here.

Jessica Cheung:  And if you turn the dial in Petersburg, can you hear any other radio station out there?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, you can catch 88.5, which is the Lutheran Church.

Jessica Cheung:  And that’s it?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, they broadcast for the shut ins that can’t make it to their service on Sunday. And that’s the only other service that’s on the FM dial. And there’s nothing on the AM dial.

What follows in the interview is a description of a service that reminds me of the "party line" feature on the local radio station I listened to while growing up in the Arkansas Ozarks.  On KFSK, it is called Tradio.  Here's an excerpt: 

Tom Abbott:  Where the caller calls in to the radio station. We put them on the air. And they either make an announcement about an event coming up. Maybe they’re having a garage sale on Saturday.

Archived Recording:  And we have tons of stuff — chairs, dozens of hand tools, fishing poles, sporting goods. There’s books and movies. And you name it, we got it.

Tom Abbott:  Well, this week, we’ve got a lot of fishing poles. Or this week, we’ve got a lot of baby clothes, something, whatever it may be.

Archived Recording:  Yes, good morning. This is Earl. I got a 2012 Nissan red vehicle with low mileage.

As Cheung expresses it, 

This is basically Facebook Marketplace on the radio.

At some point, Abbott starts talking about how the station ceased live broadcasts of some meetings during the pandemic because what some residents were saying at the meetings constituted misinformation, as locals stated their opinions about public health measures.

Cheung then turns to the likely effect of the proposed federal budget cuts on KFSK. 

Tom Abbott:  Our service would be drastically altered. The CPB funding that we receive is 30 percent of our budget. As public radio does, we rely on membership donations. And that is our largest single source. Our second largest single source funding is CPB funds.

Jessica Cheung:  And without that 30 percent you get from the federal government, what are you contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  As far as the expenses go, personnel expenses are 65 percent of our budget.

Jessica Cheung:  And how many personnel do you have on staff right now?

Tom Abbott:  Five, and there’s two high school kids that help us out when we’re doing live broadcasts in the evenings. And going forward, I foresee KFSK eliminating all staff except for two. And both of those I would like to see it remain two reporters. If you were to go down to one reporter, you’re on an endless cycle of burnout.

Jessica Cheung:  And is it my understanding that with 30 percent cut, you could still survive? Or is taking KFSK off the air an option you’re contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t think you’d ever have to go off the air, because the infrastructure is here, the antenna is here. But it wouldn’t be locally run anymore. It just couldn’t be. 

Right now, we have 27 individual public radio stations in the state of Alaska. I think that’s going to go down to two, maybe three if this rescission goes through. It’s not going to happen immediately, but it’s going to go that route. And that’s what’s under threat here.

Then Abbott discusses how some NPR reporting has been received by locals. There's a lot here, and I'm just going to include a very brief excerpt:

Tom Abbott:  [W]hat we have control over is local. I have no control over the editorial content of NPR. I have no control over that whatsoever.

In fact, I have, myself, as a station manager, contacted them many times over the years with complaints. I think there are certain subject matters that are covered heavily that are not necessarily representative. They’re certainly not representative of the audience that I serve.

Jessica Cheung:  Is there a specific story that you’re thinking about, maybe one that you wrote to NPR about?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t know. What comes to mind is the propensity for the LGBTQ+ stories. I don’t believe that the percentage of the stories that that subject matter has is equivalent to certainly the service area that I have. And I’m not saying that people are not caring about others. I’m not saying that at all.

I get the editorial decision on it. It’s under threat. But I’m just saying, what is pertinent in your personal life? And I think this holds for Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, wherever you are. Small town, rural areas, to me, it sounds like the editorial decisions are being made for the audiences that are in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, the big metro areas.

And on occasion, there is a great story that NPR does that covers small-town America or relates to small-town America plenty of times. I’m not saying that they totally have a blind eye towards it. I just think the target audience that NPR has is metro areas.

Jessica Cheung:  And what would you rather hear get coverage by NPR?

Tom Abbott:  Well, what’s the effect of the tariffs on the farmers of America, the seafood industry of America? That would really resonate here locally.

Following on this excellent and very comprehensive podcast focused on KFSK in Alaska, the New York Times editorial board published on July 16, "This is Why America Needs Public Media." Here, I'm just going to excerpt the part that mentions rural places, as well as an acknowledgement that NPR's programming (as distinct from local programming) may not reflect "the citizenry that is subsidizing them": 

When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding. Police departments, the military, Medicare, Social Security and public education offer other examples.

* * *

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them.

* * *  

We are reminded of the excesses of the “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.

* * *

Public media, like every other major institution, is imperfect. But it improves the lives of millions of Americans, and it strengthens American interests. 

I earlier commented on NPR's political bias here.  To be clear, I completely trust NPR's reporting on factual matters, such as whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  It was not.  I simply think that the entity's editorial slant is often far enough to the left of middle America to fuel distrust by many--as suggested by some of the patrons of KFSK.

Finally, today, NPR's Frank Langfitt reported from Dunmore, West Virginia, under the headline, "Cuts to public media will smash budgets of some local radio stations."  I'll just include some key excerpts here:  

[S]ome of those hardest hit by Congress' decision last week to clawback $1.1 billion in federal funds are small radio operations that provide local news and information to rural communities.

One is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a cooperative of three stations which cover Pocahontas County, West Virginia as well as Bath and Highland counties in Virginia. Allegheny Mountain is not an NPR member station, but it does run NPR's daily newscast, a quick run down of top stories.

* * * 

Allegheny Mountain's mix of programming includes local news and information as well as gospel, country and blues shows. A recent episode of the Noon Hour Magazine reported on a $5,000 signing bonus to attract new teachers and how the energy demands from data centers could eventually affect this remote region where people sometimes have to drive 60 miles to reach the nearest shopping center.

Allegheny Mountain relies on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for up to 65 percent of its annual budget of about half a million dollars. Smith says his stations do have financial reserves, but the hole in their budget could become existential.

Langfitt quotes station's general manager:

There is only so long that you can continue to exist when you are operating in the red. ... At some point that well runs dry.

One bottom line, this quoting the NYT editorial:

[T]he “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds.   

It is local stations, trying to provide local programming, that will suffer most from these cuts, along with their listeners.  

One other detail worth noting on the Congressional vote to claw back the public media funding:  Senator Mike Rounds (R) of South Dakota had previously indicated that he would oppose the cuts but decided to support the package after "top Trump administration officials" said they would steer unspent funds 'to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption' for next year."  Yet, Loris Taylor of Native Public Media commented: 

There is currently no clear path for redirecting these funds to tribal broadcasters without significant legislative and administrative changes.

Op-ed by Alaska legislators decries likely effect of "Big Beautiful Bill, "especially in rural areas

Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel of the Alaska legislature have published an op-ed in today's New York Times, "Our State Cannot Survive this Bill:"  One of the legislators is a Republican and the other an Independent, and they focus on their bipartisanship.  In some ways, this piece echoes analysis we are seeing about how many "red states" will suffer particularly under Trump's "big beautiful bill," but it also features some Alaska specifics.

Here's the lede: 

Across the country, state lawmakers like us are bracing as the federal government considers a bill that will throw state budgets into chaos and add red tape that our social service agencies do not have the capacity to administer. If the budget reconciliation bill passes Congress in anything like its current form, we will be left to deal with the fallout.

The likely impacts from the “big, beautiful bill” are particularly ugly for our home state, Alaska: Nearly 40,000 Alaskans could lose health care coverage, thousands of families will go hungry through loss of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the shift in costs from the federal government to the state will plunge our budget into a severe deficit, cripple our state economy and make it harder to provide basic services.

And in these paragraphs, the writers get around to the rural angle: 

The benefits of Medicaid and the SNAP program permeate the entire fabric of the Alaska economy, with one in three Alaskans receiving Medicaid, including more than half of the children. In remote Arctic communities, Medicaid dollars make medical travel possible for residents from the hundreds of roadless villages to the communities where they are able to receive proper medical treatments.

We fear that if this bill passes, a village in rural Alaska might lose its one and only grocery store because of a drastic decline in SNAP dollars. It might also lose its sole health care clinic or hospital because it cannot sustain its services with decreased Medicaid reimbursements. The reconciliation bill does not take into account the uniqueness of Alaskan lifestyles and geographic remoteness.

The legislators explain that the federal cuts will cause costs for many services to be shifted to the state budget, which will cause great strain.  It also takes up the fact that work requirements for public benefits are an ill fit for rural Americans.

Alaska cannot afford to lose health care funding. Our state is near the top of the list for the highest rates of suicide, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in the nation. It is also severely lacking in adequate behavioral health services. The cuts will only make these problems worse.

Work requirements instituted in Medicaid are untenable for rural Alaska, with many communities facing limited broadband access and job opportunities.

Here's a piece in The Atlantic, by Russell Berman, suggesting that Kentucky Republicans are not afraid to stand up to Trump. 

A distinctive angle on shifting rural livelihooods

Marketplace (American Public Media) reported this week on the impact of the rising price of silver on the livelihoods of indigenous silversmiths.   The story by Savannah Peters features a Navajo and Hopi silversmith, JJ Otero.  Here's a key quote that touches (at the end) on the implications  for rural livleihoods of the rise in price for raw materials: 

Otero recently raised the price of his jewelry by about 10% across the board to account for his rising material costs. He said he can do that because he’s been smithing for over a decade and has curated a loyal following on social media, where he markets his work to wealthy clients all over the country.

“The folks that have the means, they’re not bothered by the increase in price,” Otero said.

Business is moving a bit slower, but Otero said he’s still able to find a home for his pricier work. But not all Indigenous artists have the social media prowess or even internet access that would allow them to follow Otero’s business model. He said those who sell roadside or via middle-men like trading posts and galleries have less pricing flexibility.

“I’m always reminded of what my dad told me that first year when I started making jewelry,” Otero said. “He would say it in Navajo, that my tools and the things I make with my tools are gonna take care of you.”

Today, Otero’s jewelry business takes care of him and his family. It allowed him to leave his career in IT and move from Albuquerque home to Torreon, on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation, and support his parents as they grow older. But for Indigenous artists just now getting their start, he worries that parh to a rural livelihood could be slipping out of reach.

The ripple effects of a pivot away from clean energy reach Humboldt County

Efforts to develop offshore wind infrastructure off the coast of California have run into a confluence of Trump administration priorities: reducing federal spending, eliminating clean energy projects, and undoing anything related to the Biden administration. In a widely expected move, the Trump administration announced that they were pausing all offshore wind leasing and reviewing existing leases for potential termination. 

Since that announcement, companies planning to build wind turbines off the coast of Humboldt County announced significant layoffs, a sign that those projects may no longer be moving forward. While the Trump administration's announcement did not immediately revoke the permits for the planned offshore wind sites off of Morro Bay and Humboldt County, development of these sites and the onshore infrastructure needed to build the wind turbines and carry the electricity to its destination markets requires a huge investment that offshore wind supporters believe would almost certainly require federal funding. Given the current administration's posture towards wind and other clean energy sources (not to mention towards the entire state of California), that funding will not be coming anytime soon. Thus, it is not surprising that the companies who already paid the U.S. government $757.1 million to lease tracts of the ocean for wind energy appear to be rolling back those plans and cutting jobs that would have been focused on those projects.

In addition to the direct impacts on those losing their jobs with these wind energy developers, the Trump administration's decision to pull support for offshore wind will affect those in Humboldt County who were hoping for the economic benefits that were promised to accompany these projects. As part of the lease bidding process, bidding companies were required to "commit to mak[ing] a qualifying monetary contribution to programs or initiatives that benefit the greater Humboldt County community." The agreement with the federal government provided for about 7.5% of the bid amounts to go to local stakeholders, a not-insignificant amount considering that the total bids amounted to over $750 million for parcels off Morro Bay and Humboldt County. It is unclear how much of that money the County and other local stakeholders have received.

Beyond the direct payments, however, local communities stood to gain from accompanying investments in electric infrastructure and in making significant upgrades to the Humboldt Bay Harbor District, as well as accompanying increases in economic activity in the local area. Now, whether any of those benefits will materialize is an open question.

Even before the Trump administration moved to scuttle clean energy development, many locals in Humboldt County were skeptical about the promised benefits from wind projects. Calmatters' Julie Cart, in her excellent reporting on offshore wind development in California, noted that local communities would bear social costs and face strains on infrastructure, including higher housing costs and utility upgrades. 

As previously discussed on this blog, Humboldt County has experienced a series of boom-and-bust cycles from different industries, including timber, fishing, and cannabis, that have brought prosperity to the region only to collapse and give way to economic despair. Humboldt County's Director of Economic Development, Scott Adair, shared that locals "are cautious about the flimflam, if you will, the over-promisers."

Adair also noted that, even if locals are skeptical, the fate of the project is out of their hands.

“This is a federal project that is happening to us,” Adair said. “We have a limited ability to be involved and to help steer or shape the outcomes of the project.”

County supervisors expressed some cautious optimism that underscores how the region stood to gain and how it has suffered from prior economic hardships: 

The supervisors said they are excited about the possibilities, but they also worry about the pitfalls and are bracing for disappointment. “I go into this with my eyes wide open,” said Supervisor Rex Bohn. “I pray this happens. I hope like hell this happens.

From outside of Humboldt County, offshore wind is considered critical to achieving California's zero-carbon targets for electricity. 

“There is an undeniable urgency,” said David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission. “California has had unprecedented climate challenges. There is a fierce urgency to respond. We have to stop being academic on this. We have to build.”

But this urgency is not enough to justify the project's presence in Humboldt for many locals who have felt burned by prior experiences with extractive industry. Phillip Williams, a member of the Yurok Tribal Council, was extremely skeptical about relying on this project for economic benefits to the local communities:

“Everybody's lining up. It's almost like there's a predator. ‘Okay, these guys are weak. We can come in here and take advantage of this community that’s this desperate for dollars, because they've already depleted all their natural resources. What else can we extract from these communities, and these communities are so desperate, that they're willing to jump off the bridge blind, in hopes that there's gold at the bottom,’” he said.

Like other communities along the North Coast, Williams said the Yuroks need sustainable jobs, but not at any cost. More than a third of tribal members live below the poverty line, 60% of them children.

 Now that it appears likely that the project will be delayed, if not abandoned, skeptics in the local community may be breathing a sigh of relief. Their reactions to the proposed project certainly show the importance of local input and the potential pain that can be caused by major infrastructure development in rural and economically depressed areas. But the climate crisis continues unabated, and the Trump administration has not announced any proposals for economic development in Humboldt County to lessen the impact of the potential loss of offshore wind. 

Understanding rural access to justice requires understanding historical economic injustice

Understanding rural access to justice issues in the rural South can be a bit complicated. As I outlined back in February, many places in the rural South have withstood the complete collapse of democracy in their communities. For the first half of the twentieth century, communities of color in these states had to reckon with a world where every lever of power, including the media, was captured by white supremacist interests. The people affected were denied access to anything that could have reasonably built wealth, their ability to own property was restricted, and they were limited in what educational or economic opportunities they could pursue. The scars of this past can be seen in high poverty rates and other statistics of despair across the region. Understanding this history is important to understanding the difficulties accessing justice in these communities and why it's important to fight for it. 

As with my last post, I am going to focus on my home, Eastern North Carolina. And I am not just going to look at my home county, I am going to look at the broader region. North Carolina has 11 counties that exist in a state of "persistent poverty"

Persistent Poverty Counties in North Carolina
Source: North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management

(as defined by the federal government) and all of them are rural counties in the eastern part of the state. Eastern North Carolina is also home to large Black and Indigenous populations. In fact, as of the 2020 Census, North Carolina has the highest concentration of Indigenous people east of the Mississippi River. 

Eastern North Carolina was the economic and political powerhouse in the state's early history. From the American Revolution until the 1910 Census, Wilmington was almost consistently the state's largest city. The only exception was the 1820 Census, where it was temporarily replaced by fellow Eastern North Carolina city (and the state's first capital), New Bern. This growth was fueled by agriculture and the shipment of goods out of ports along the coast. With economic success came political power. One of the leading perpetrators of the Wilmington coup in 1898 and one of the leading architects of what would become Jim Crow in North Carolina, Furnifold Simmons was from New Bern. Simmons was rewarded for his efforts in ushering in white supremacist rule with a United States Senate seat, from which he ran a political machine that almost single handedly selected the state's elected leadership. Simmons served in the Senate from 1901 - 1931 and is still the longest-serving United States Senator in the state's history. 

Poverty rates in North Carolina
Source: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. 

The region's economic and political prosperity was enjoyed only by a select few. A lot of people in Eastern North Carolina have long existed in deep, multigenerational poverty. For the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow and white supremacy reigned supreme in North Carolina. Blacks and Indigenous people were systemically excluded from many economic and educational opportunities and were often forced to work as underpaid farm labor. These decisions by the political leaders of Eastern North Carolina have had disastrous long-term impacts on the region. The decline of agriculture in the state was most acutely felt in Eastern North Carolina and its importance to the state's economy has long been supplanted by emergence of the banking industry in Charlotte and the education and tech industries in the Raleigh-Durham area. Because of poverty and spatial isolation, many people in the region are still denied access to economic and educational opportunities. The legacy of Jim Crow lives on. 

This history shapes what access to justice means and what it looks like in Eastern North Carolina. The economic subjugation of entire groups of people impacts their access to institutions of power.

A flex from China's rural women

The top story on the New York Times website right now--at least for us on the Pacific coast--is about rural Chinese women. The headline is, "In Rural China, ‘Sisterhoods’ Demand Justice, and Cash."  Vivian Wang reports; here is the lede:  

The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits.

This reminds me of the case of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (U.S. Supreme Court 1979).  This excerpt from the case digest should explain the comparison based on a loss of rights for women who married outside their tribe:  

Respondents, a female member of the Santa Clara Pueblo and her daughter, brought this action for declaratory and injunctive relief against petitioners, the Pueblo and its Governor, alleging that a Pueblo ordinance that denies tribal membership to the children of female members who marry outside the tribe, but not to similarly situated children of men of that tribe, violates Title I of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA), 25 U.S.C. §§ 1301-1303, which, in relevant part, provides that "[n]o Indian tribe in exercising powers of self-government shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws." 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8). The ICRA's only express remedial provision, 25 U.S.C. § 1303, extends the writ of habeas corpus to any person, in a federal court, "to test the legality of his detention by order of an Indian tribe." The District Court held that jurisdiction was conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 1343(4) and 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8), apparently concluding that the substantive provisions of Title I impliedly authorized civil actions for declaratory and injunctive relief, and also that the tribe was not immune from such a suit. Subsequently, the court found for petitioners on the merits. The Court of Appeals, while agreeing on the jurisdictional issue, reversed on the merits.

A novel approach to (literally) meeting criminal justice system-involved individuals where they are

NPR reported last week from Aneth, Utah, in the state's southeast corner.  That's part of the Dine (Navajo) nation, and the story features a novel program for easing the burden of criminal justice-system involved individuals' engagement with the federal court based hours away in Salt Lake City.  The headline is "Utah, hoping for tangible results on recidivism, is looking for possible solutions."  

Tilda Wilson reports on the work of U.S Magistrate Judge, Dustin Pead and federal parole officer who are going to where the system-involved individuals are, rather than expecting the individuals to come to them, hours away in other corners of the state:  

Aneth, Utah, is a tiny town on the Navajo Nation, surrounded by a beautiful landscape of red rocks and desert. On a chilly winter morning, it was just starting to rain at the Aneth Chapter House, a sort of reservation town hall. Today, U.S. magistrate Judge Dustin Pead is holding court here.

DUSTIN PEAD: The district is quite large. We don't have a probation officer located in the area.

WILSON: Pead drove six hours to be here, about 350 miles from the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. He comes down once a month to check in on people under court supervision. In Salt Lake, there's a lot more drug and mental health treatment available to help people when they get out of prison. Out here, those things are hard to come by. Pead says it makes sense that it's so much more difficult to get out of bad patterns of crime. So nine years ago, Pead started bringing court to the reservation, traveling with probation officers, a prosecutor and a public defender. It's called Tribal Community Reentry Court.

PEAD: It would be the first reentry court that we had heard of that would actually travel to people instead of having people travel to the court.

WILSON: Pead, the lawyers and probation officers are able to spend face-to-face time building rapport with each supervisee and their loved ones.

PEAD: I want them to have trust that we want them to grow. I'm not waiting to catch them in a violation. So for me, that's frequently calling them by their first name, giving accolades, knowing them, knowing their family, communicating with their family during court.

WILSON: It's working. The federal court says the recidivism rate has dropped to just 6% for people who participate in the Tribal Reentry Court. Cordell Wilson is a parole officer who has been working on the Navajo Nation since 2002. He's based 5 1/2 hours away in St. George. He used to only be able to visit people on the Navajo Nation every three months or so when something went wrong. Now visiting monthly, Wilson says he's able to build trust with the people he works with. He says it works a lot better.

NYT op-ed on Biden's investments in rural America: Why they matter and how to make them happen

Tony Pipa of the Brookings Institution wrote in the New York Times opinion section this weekend under the headline, "Biden Wants to Send Billions to Rural America, but This Must Happen First."  

President Biden regularly emphasizes how the major pieces of legislation he has signed — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — expand opportunities for Americans.

This is especially true for rural Americans. Those three laws appropriated billions of dollars — about $464 billion — for many projects that could be particularly relevant to rural communities, allowing them to dream of a different economic future.

I am often asked if rural voters will give Mr. Biden credit for all that money and the changes it could bring and will show their appreciation at the ballot box. My answer is that it is unrealistic to expect place-specific investments to have an immediate impact on elections.

Rural places remain skeptical that federal policymakers have their best interests at heart. Proving otherwise will take intention and time.

Pipa goes on to explain how important implementation is, by which he refers to the lack of bandwidth many rural local governments have to plan, develop projects, and write grants.   This is because many of these local governments are run by officials who are elected but unpaid.   Here's some data he uses to illustrate the point:   

Only 15 percent of Michigan’s smallest jurisdictions, for example, express confidence in their ability to get access to federal grants, whereas the rate for jurisdictions over 30,000 people is close to 40 percent. A national survey published in 2019 found more than half of rural counties experienced moderate or significant fiscal stress, so for programs where local governments must match the federal funding, those counties face an additional challenge.

This, Pipa predicts, portends likely inequitable distribution of these federal monies.  He also gives a nod to the recent debate over whether rural places are worthy of investment.  

These human capital issues and the impact they have on garnering federal dollars, as well as charitable grant funding, have been addressed in prior posts here, here, and here.  

Pipa's X (formerly Twitter) thread about the op-ed is here.  

I discuss some of the issues Pipa raises--in particular the challenge of showing rural folks that the federal government is working for them, too--in my recent commentary in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society:  "Mustering the political will to help left-behind places in a polarized USA." 

Art Cullen turns his attention to rural poverty

This is from Cullen's Substack today, "Iowa's unique sort of rural poverty."  Cullen recently traveled to New Orleans and back from northern Iowa (and he did so in an electric Ford pick up truck, no less).  Here's a rumination that begins as he passed from northeast Arkansas into southeast Missouri.  

Coming from relatively prosperous Iowa, I continue to be stunned by the scenes of grinding rural poverty when you get off the freeways and revisit Hwy. 61 or its cousins.

Drive the edge of gorgeous Mark Twain National Forest enroute from Jonesboro, Ark., to the Gateway to the Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, Mo., where the downtown is dead empty on a Saturday afternoon but for an open sports bar with no customers. A sign on the bar proclaims it is doing what it can to save the downtown.

The action is out on the highway in a town of 16,000 whose population steadily declined since 1980, set in the prettiest hills you could behold.

Shacks line the road in Arkansas, Black and White folks. You see the same in South Dakota off Interstate 90 (substitute Native American for Black), or in eastern Colorado, or in a Kansas cowtown time and progress passed by.

You get back to Iowa where the farmsteads look better, the dirt blacker, the machinery shinier. Yet the rust sets in here, too.

Nationally, the rural poverty rate is about 15% compared to an urban rate of about 11%. Those statistics do not reflect the extremes you see in the little burgs waylaid by the freeways.

Cullen goes on to offer further comparisons of that Arkansas/Missouri area to northwest Iowa, where he lives,  The entire post is well worth a read, not least for its discussion of the significance of immigration and race--and, of course, what freeways have done to downtowns, including those like Poplar Bluff. 

Rural broadband in the news as Affordable Connectivity Program comes to an end

I've been hearing a lot about rural folks in relation to broadband the last few weeks because a federal program, the Affordable Connectivity Program, is expiring.  Here are a smattering of stories that acknowledged the rural angle on this event. 

First, here is some CalMatters coverage, which explains lots of basics and also acknowledges the rural impact. 

On April 30, a popular and widely used government program began the process of shutting down due to congressional inaction. With its demise, closing the digital divide becomes considerably more difficult.

The federal government first launched a broadband subsidy program during the depths of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, where internet connections became many peoples’ only window into the outside world. That effort, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), was made permanent as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It offered a $30 monthly subsidy ($75 on tribal lands) to qualifying low-income households for broadband internet or cell phone bills. The program also offers up to $100 toward a computer or tablet.

However, it came with a major caveat: The $14.2 billion Congress allocated toward the program was a one-time thing. When the money ran out at some point in the future, Congress would have to infuse the program with more money or find a more permanent funding solution.

That future has officially arrived. More than 23 million American households, about 45% of all those eligible nationwide, will no longer receive the full subsidies that previously helped them get online. Two-thirds of those households had “inconsistent or zero connectivity prior to ACP enrollment,” a recent Federal Communications Commission survey revealed.

Partial subsidies of $14 ($35 for households on Tribal lands) will be available for some ISP customers for service in May, according to an FCC notice. But that will be the program’s last disbursement.

“Many recent press reports about the impending end of this program describe how ACP households across the country are now facing hard choices about what expenses they have to cut, including food and gas, to maintain their broadband access, with some households doubtful they can afford to keep their broadband service at all,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in an April letter to congressional leaders. “These press reports echo what the Commission has been hearing from ACP households directly, with many writing the agency to express their distress and fear that ending this program could lead them to lose access to the internet at home.”

Case in point: Alfredo Camacho, who lives in Guadalupe, California, told CalMatters that because he is no longer able to afford home internet service, he’s started taking his daughters to the parking lot outside a local library so the family can use the free wifi to do homework and look for jobs.

“This takes away grocery money,” said Camacho, who is one of around three million Golden State residents losing access to the subsidy. “Being a single father, $30 goes a long way.”

In anticipation of the shut-down, the program stopped accepting new sign-ups in early February. Participating households started receiving notifications about the program’s potential shuttering in January. After it ends, internet service providers are required to allow ACP-using households to cancel without termination fees.

The program has been an essential part of how millions of Americans get online, with nearly one-in-five U.S. households relying on the subsidy to keep their internet subscriptions active. Uptake has been especially strong in areas with high-poverty rates in both urban and rural areas.

Here is a Forbes story from May 6, 2024, with no acknowledgment of rural difference or disadvantage:

Congress first allocated $14.2 billion to the Affordable Connectivity Program in December of 2021, and that money—used to provide a $30 to $75 stipend toward internet bills per month and for a one-time discount toward the purchase of a laptop computer, desktop or tablet—is now running out.

The bill introduced to save the program would allocate $7 billion more to extend it through the end of the year and allow Congress to “work out the long-term changes that are needed for sustainable access,” according to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.)

Before receiving the federal internet subsidy, almost 22% of program participants had no personal internet service and another 25% had only mobile internet, according to a 2023 survey by the Federal Communications Commission.

The same survey found that almost 77% of beneficiaries said they would need to make changes to their broadband plan if they stopped receiving the subsidy, with 30% saying they'd need to drop internet service altogether.

The New York Times reported on this pending wind-down in March.  

The program was tucked into the 2021 infrastructure law as a replacement for a pandemic-era program that provided certain households discounts on their internet bills. Although there is some bipartisan support to continue the subsidies, lawmakers have not passed an extension.

Interestingly, while it does not use the word "rural," it does include this somewhat counterintuitive quote from the Senator of South Dakota, a state popularly thought of as a rural place. 

But some Republicans have argued that the program is wasteful. In a December letter to the F.C.C., Senator John Thune of South Dakota and other Republican lawmakers raised concerns about the program subsidizing households that already had internet service. They have also pointed to findings from the F.C.C.’s Office of Inspector General, which has in recent months expressed concerns about some providers failing to comply with program rules and improperly claiming funds.

Finally, here's the Federal Communication Commission's webpage on the issue, which covers the basics, but/and also does not use the word "rural":  

The Affordable Connectivity Program stopped accepting new applications and enrollments on February 7, 2024. The last fully funded month of the program is April 2024.

All ACP households enrolled at the time of the enrollment freeze, February 7, 2024 at 11:59 PM ET, will be able to remain enrolled through the final month of ACP service if they are not required to be de-enrolled under FCC rules.

Households that are de-enrolled from the program, such as for failure to use their ACP-supported service, will not be able to re-apply or re-enroll in the ACP during the enrollment freeze.

ACP enrolled households are strongly encouraged to carefully review written notices from their internet company and from the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), the ACP administrator, about the ACP wind-down.

Households are also encouraged to consult their internet company to learn more about how the end of the ACP will impact their internet service and bills.

I'm glad that at least some of these sources recognize the rural angle on the digital divide.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLVI): American Spirits

Reviewers have been mostly positive about Russell Banks' last book, American Spirits, which was published posthumously a few months ago, and  I recently got around to reading it and found the insights regarding rural folks, including their attachment to place and to the land, quite compelling.  The book is comprised of three stories, each set in Sam Dent, a fictional small town in New York's Adirondacks.

This excerpt is from the first of the book's three stories, "Nowhere Man," which involves a man, Doug Lafleur, who, with his sisters, sold their interest in the land they inherited from their father (Guy Lafleur) in the rural Adirondacks to a man from New Jersey, Yuri Zingerman, a mysterious figure.  

Zingerman’s shooting range was a half mile farther up the narrow gravel lane that passed in front of [Doug’s] and Debbie’s ranch house. When he and Debbie got married, Doug’s father, Guy Lafleur, sold him the eight-acre lot for one dollar as a wedding present, and on weekends over the next three years Doug and his brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave, built their house where the lane ended and their land began. After Doug’s dad died, Doug and his two sisters, Nina and Tracy, and their husbands, Roy and Dave, his brothers-in-law and hunting companions, sold off the rest of the old man’s land, all 320 acres. It was the last large tract of undeveloped forested land inside the town limits. They sold it to Yuri Zingerman from New Jersey. He said he wanted it for a private hunting preserve, but promised Doug that he and Roy and Dave could continue to hunt on the property. Zingerman said he was a veteran of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, but he talked with a regular American accent. He ran a company in New Jersey that provided security for celebrities and professional athletes and business executives. It was impressive when he named who they were. 

 

Doug, who worked as a full-time caretaker for summer residents and a part-time handyman in the winter months, spent his share of the cash sale of his dad’s land on a new Dodge Ram pickup and paid off the mortgage on the house. Without the mortgage hanging over them, he figured he could support the family with his caretaking and seasonal work as a handyman, and maybe in a year or two he could build a third bedroom onto the house and the two-car garage Debbie wanted. They could get off food stamps and buy health insurance. When the twins were old enough for Debbie to go back to waitressing full time instead of part time, which should be soon, they’d be sitting pretty. That’s how he put it to anyone who’d listen, with his lips pursed in an air kiss. Sitting pretty. (pp. 10-11)  

This is after Zingerman orders Doug not to hunt on the family property, Lafleur Woods, any longer.  Doug is speaking initially to his wife, Debbie, who pushes back against his plan to continue hunting:

“He can go straight to hell if he thinks I’m not hunting on Pop’s land.” 

 

“Who? It’s not Pop’s anymore, remember?” 

 

“No. It’ll always be Pop’s. Just like it’ll always be Grandpop’s. That’s why people call it Lafleur’s Woods. Those two old boys, Pop and Grandpop, they’d roll over in their graves if they thought me and Roy and Dave couldn’t hunt that land. Max, too. Max’s gonna get his chance to hunt those woods, just like I did when I was his age. And my dad before me. And Grandpop. That sonofabitch Zingerman, he can have his hunting camp out there if he wants, he paid for that right, but he can’t keep me from tramping across those ridges and creeks that I know like the lines of my own hand and killing a deer once a year and busting up a few coveys of partridges and quails. It’s my goddamn birthright.” 

 

She was silent for a moment. She knew that he’d had three gin and tonics and had been publicly humiliated by Zingerman, but even if he were stone-cold sober and Zingerman had managed to be polite and had apologized for posting the land and barring him from hunting it, Doug would be threatening to kill his deer over there anyway. He was a man. That’s what men do. She knew that by tomorrow he’d be trying to talk Zingerman out of his decision, and by Monday he’d be grumbling about Zingerman’s decision, and when hunting season opened, he’d meet up early with Dave and Roy, and they would hunt on somebody else’s land, not Zingerman’s. Not Pop’s and Grandpop’s.  (p. 22) 

 * * * 

“We’ll just go in there early the first day of the season and take out our deer, and the hell with him,” he told Debbie. “He’ll never even know we done it.” 

 

“Doug, that’s about as dumb a thing as you’ve ever thought of doing.” 

 

“Sometimes you got to do a foolish thing in order to do the right thing,” he said. 

 

“I’m not letting Max go with you.” 

 

“Whoa. When it comes to educating the boy to hunting, I’ll say when he’s ready. It’s a lifelong process, and it starts now for him. He’s ready to drive the deer, or at least watch how it’s done. He won’t carry a gun for four more years, but he’s got a lot he can learn before then. I started carrying a gun a lot younger than that, y’know. Of course, that was before the government started chipping away at the Second Amendment,” he added. 

 

“Please, don’t start,” she said. 

 

“What if Zingerman…?” “What if Zingerman what? Worst he can do is call the state police, and by the time they arrive, we’re back here at the house butchering a deer we can say we shot in the yard from the deck in our stocking feet.” 

 

“What’s that going to teach Max? That it’s okay to lie to the police?” 

 

“The staties all know me and Roy and Dave. They don’t care where we shot our deer. They don’t like Zingerman any more than we do. Actually, the one I want to be teaching is Zingerman. He’s the one needs a lesson. Coming into our town like this and snatching out of circulation three hundred twenty acres of prime hunting grounds. And I want Max to know we aren’t gonna let him get away with it. I want the whole damn town to know it. And the state police, too.” 

 

“You’re the one who sold him the land. You and your sisters.” 

 

“Yeah, but we had a deal. It’s him who changed the rules. And I’m just saying no, that’s all. No, dammit. No.” 

* * *  

[Debbie]  didn’t buy Doug’s sudden sentimental attachment to his father’s and grandfather’s land. Where’d that come from? He’d been all too happy to join his sisters, Nina and Tracy, when they had the chance to sell the land to Zingerman, and they would have done it even if Zingerman hadn’t promised not to subdivide or develop it and hadn’t given them permission to hunt there. Doug wanted the money. He needed the money, not the land. They all did. (p. 24) 

 Then there is this powerful passage about Doug's attachment to the property:    

For seventy-some years this forest was the Lafleur family’s private hunting preserve. Before that, for a hundred years it was a Boston-based timber company’s wilderness cache of uncut trees, part of the land across the region that got auctioned off in the 1930s and ’40s for pennies an acre when the company shifted operations south, and in 1947 Doug’s grandfather had bought a chunk of it. Before that, before the American settlers and the British and the French Canadians and the Dutch, for ten thousand years it was the Mohawks’ and Mi’kmaqs’ home ground. Doug liked thinking about that. He liked calling up that long line of woodsmen and hunters. He liked to believe that he was descended from them, that his relation to this piece of the earth matched theirs, that he knew in all seasons its streams and brooks and swamps, its glacial forests changing from hardwoods to dark conifers to ferny sunlit patches, that he knew it fully as well as those old-time hunters did, and he knew the man-made trails and paths laid down over centuries on top of the trails and paths followed for millennia by the animals before the humans made their way here, and he knew the behavior and habits and needs and desires of all the animals and birds that lived in the forest. 

 

Without that ancient connection to the land, who was Doug Lafleur, anyhow? No one. Nothing. Just a not very talented amateur musician hanging around this small town for a lifetime, finding easy ways to house and feed his wife and kids and spending too much time at the local tavern amusing his neighbors with tall tales and dumb songs, a man with no good reason to be living and working here instead of somewhere else. Christ, anywhere. And no matter where he lived and worked, wouldn’t it be the same? 

 

A nowhere man, that’s what he’d become. Like the guy in the Beatles’ song. 

 

It was a mistake to sell the land to Zingerman, he said to himself. A mistake to sell it to anyone. He and his sisters should have clung to it for another generation for Max and his cousins to grow up on. It wasn’t fair to blame the old man, but Doug’s father had started the process by selling Doug the eight-acre pie-shaped corner adjacent to Route 50. The old man at first didn’t want to sell off the flat, birch-covered stretch of ground, but Doug, newly married, wanted to build his own house, even if he had to borrow fifty thousand from the bank to do it. He talked the old man into signing over the eight acres for a dollar an acre so he could use the appraised value of the land, a thousand times what he’d paid for it, to guarantee the bank loan. Doug and his father thought they were outsmarting the bankers.

 

They never should have done it, though. No one outsmarts the bankers. With help from his brothers-in-law over the next three years he built the one-story, two-bedroom bungalow with a full basement, and though he knew he could have done it cheaper with a double-wide set on cinderblocks, he wouldn’t have been able to expand on a double-wide, someday adding a third bedroom and a two-car garage with a tool room, the same as he could on a regular house. With his meager income from caretaking the homes of summer residents and handyman work over the winter, the mortgage payments turned out to be more than he could afford—several years into it and he was still paying mostly interest, and the principal was down barely seven hundred dollars from the fifty thousand he’d borrowed, and recently he’d been falling behind and was being charged penalties for late payments. 

 

After the old man died he never should have agreed with Nina and Tracy to sell the rest of the land in order to pay off the bank loan with his third of the inheritance. He could have somehow figured out a way to make the mortgage payments by taking a night shift at one of the resort hotels or a factory job in one of the larger towns downstate. Or he and Debbie could have sold the house instead and rented an apartment or a house in town. They might have saved enough that way to afford health insurance. And after they sold their father’s land, he shouldn’t have bought the new pickup. 

 

He could have squeezed a couple more years’ use from his old rust bucket of a truck. He and his sisters would still own the Lafleur Woods, the headwaters of Blackstone Kill, the sedimented shale slabs cut crosswise by the kill and the ridges and gullies, the moraines and eskers and erratics and the rock-strewn till left behind by the retreating glaciers ten thousand years ago. He’d still be able to hunt on his ancestors’ land. This love of the land, this irrational claim on it, was Doug’s strength, and it was his weakness.  (pp. 28-31) 

 Then (spoiler alert!) there is a show down between Doug and Zingerman, each wielding a gun:  

 Zingerman said, “Lafleur, you’re a fucking dead man.” 

 

Doug said, “I’m a nowhere man.”  (p. 60)