Tag: Rural America

For the better half of the last decade, newspapers have been treated as novelties. An under-appreciated resource whose disappearance is problematic, but for reasons that are seemingly pragmatic. To make matters worse, there doesn’t appear to be a solution in sight.

“No one is quite sure how to stop that process from happening,” University of Iowa professor David Ryfe said of the dying local paper. “There are lots of people who are worried about it, but no one has found a solution in the 15 years [since] the digital world has erupted and called attention to the issue. No one has found a solution at the regional or local level.”

Ryfe is the director at University of Iowa’s School for Journalism and Mass Communication. He is also one of the most prominent scholars on local and modern journalism, authoring 2016’s “Journalism and the Public” and 2012’s “Can Journalism Survive: A Look Inside American Newsrooms.”

“All the local newspapers have left is the local advertising,” Ryfe said. “There’s not going to be any salvation for newspapers in multimedia, in digital media, or online.”

According to a 2018 Pew Research Study, weekday newspaper circulation in 1990 was around 62 million nationwide. That number dropped to 55.7 million in 2000 and in 2017 the estimated circulation suffered another decline, topping out at just 30.9 million.

As circulation has declined, local newspapers have had to adjust for the loss in revenue, sometimes by shrinking the size of their staffs, sometimes by selling out or closing up shop all together.

The Greater Pittsburgh Area is witnessing this potentially dangerous trend firsthand. The area has lost 5 daily newspapers since 2015, with a host of others changing ownership. These changes pose a great risk in both the quality and quantity of local content.

The Downsizing of Pittsburgh’s Local News

Although changes in southwestern Pennsylvania’s newspaper industry have been happening for years, they came to a head in August when the area’s largest newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, announced the 232-year-old institution would stop printing on Tuesdays and Saturdays, bestowing Pittsburgh with the rather misfortunate honor of becoming the largest city in America without a daily newspaper.

Over the last three years, a number of daily and weekly newspapers in the surrounding area have also undergone changes.

In 2015, the Daily News in McKeesport and the Valley Independent in Monessen were among the first local papers in the region to cease operations. Both daily newspapers were owned by Trib Total Media, however, it was unable to find a buyer for either publication amidst a fire sale of local newspapers that year.

The company sold 8 publications in 2015, including the Leader Times in Kittanning and the Daily Courier in Connellsville, to West Penn Media, an affiliate of Sample Media Group which has an already established footprint in the area, publishing the Latrobe Bulletin in Westmoreland County.

Within less than a year from the start of its sell-off, Trib Total Media’s largest daily, the Pittsburgh-based Tribune-Review, would cease daily print operations and move to a solely digital platform in December 2016. The Pittsburgh City Paper, an alt-weekly, would also be purchased by the Butler, Pennsylvania, based Eagle Media Corporation that same year. 

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100 Days in Appalachia

In 2017, Calkins Media, headquartered in Pennsylvania, followed in Trib Total Media’s footsteps selling off its local publications. The Ellwood City Ledger and Beaver County Times became properties of GateHouse Media, a division of New Media Investment Group — the largest publisher in the nation today.

Calkins would also sell the Uniontown Herald-Standard to Ogden Newspapers Inc., a West Virginia-based company with more than 3,500 employees at its more than 40 daily papers. Recently Ogden, announced the purchase of the Washington Observer-Reporter from the Observer Publishing Company. With this purchase Ogden now controls the two largest daily newspapers within Washington, Fayette and Greene counties.

But the selling of small town and regional papers to national media companies isn’t specific to southwestern Pennsylvania. According to a 2016 study by the University of North Carolina, the 3 largest investment groups at the time — New Media, Digital First, and Gannett —  own a combined 900 newspapers in the U.S. with a circulation of 12.7 million.

So, Why Does Newspaper Ownership Matter?

As these local papers are gobbled up by out-of-town companies, things start to change, according to Ryfe.

“The first thing that happens is there is correspondingly less local news that is published in the newspaper,” he said, which he explained is largely the result of downsizing in newsrooms.

UNC’s 2016 report attempts to explain why that’s happening. Researchers found many of these investment groups purchase newspapers that are in debt. In acquiring these debts, the investors usually employ a formulaic approach to management, which is focused on cutting spending and trimming budgets through “laid off staff, frozen wages, reduced benefits and consolidated sales and editorial functions.”

Rebecca Devereaux, 25, experienced the cost cutting measures brought on by a newspaper’s sale firsthand when she worked for Uniontown’s Herald-Standard.

Credit Rebecca Devereaux

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A multimedia editor, Devereaux was hired by the paper, which was then owned by Calkin Media, to help increase its video and digital storytelling capabilities, but in 2017, the Herald-Standard was abruptly sold to Ogden. Devereaux was notified of the sale via email while she was on vacation.

“We didn’t know the paper was for sale, at least at my level we didn’t know,” Devereaux said. “It was very sudden.”

Under Ogden, the paper’s entire visual media department was let go, leaving one of Devereaux’s colleagues to ask: “Who is going to hire a 60-year-old photographer?” she recalled.

Since 2004, employment in the newspaper industry has dipped by 45 percent. In 2017, 39,210 individuals worked in the industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Reductions in staffing and consolidations of departments, or the outsourcing of certain newspaper functions, are meant to help the papers climb out of debt and start generating a profit, even if short-term, but the UNC study says those “profits derived from the cost-cutting have not been reinvested to improve their newspapers’ journalism, but [are] used instead to pay loans, management fees and shareholder dividends.”

Ryfe acknowledged this profit-driven approach can create a dangerous problem not just for those working in the industry, but also their readers. As more newspapers are absorbed into larger corporations, the coverage turns away from local issues and instead becomes nationalized.

“There used to be a mediating layer of political conversation that was local that had to do with potholes in the street and where to put the waste management facility, very basic problems,” Ryfe said. “The loss of that level of news has contributed to polarization and partisanship at the national level. All politics have become national, strangely enough, as this has happened.”

Ryfe warns the reduction of local reporters covering local government, keeping an eye on the inner workings of a community, can prevent the misuse of power– even if covering a city council meeting may seem trivial to the average person.

“The fact of a journalist being on the beat tends to reduce the amount of political corruption,” he said. Fewer local  journalists could lead to more substandard or negligent decision making from government officials, Ryfe added.

The Creation of News Deserts in Rural Markets

As newspapers downsize or dissolve altogether, an information gap is created, especially in rural communities where access to information doesn’t come as easy as in the nation’s more urban areas.

Metro markets usually have a surplus of news outlets, but also have something many rural communities do not — access to reliable, high speed internet that makes gathering news and information quick and accessible.

According to a 2018 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report, 68.6 percent of residents in rural areas are without broadband capabilities that meet federal guidelines for minimum upload and download speeds. This includes counties in western Pennsylvania where local news is declining, like Washington, Butler and Fayette. Approximately 14.9 million Americans are without access to high speed internet today.*

The 2016 UNC study highlights an earlier FCC report that found only 10 percent of evening television news shows are committed to local or regional news. In addition, “fewer than 40 percent of residents live in an area where they can receive all-news radio,” leaving newspapers, as sometimes, the only source of local news in rural areas. 

This creates the risk of “news deserts,” or, “places that have such a small market they can support relatively little news at all. And don’t have much news provided for them,” according to Ryfe.

Ryfe acknowledged the internet isn’t the main cause of the daily newspaper’s death and the rise of these coalescing media companies, however, it “exacerbated and accelerated it.”

*In 2015 the FCC Broadband Progress Report raised the minimum download speeds from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps and minimum upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps. At the time it tripled the number of American households without internet access.

In a Digital World, Local Papers Are Doubling Down on Print

With strained internet access in some rural communities, it may make sense for local newsrooms to focus on the traditional print medium. After all, a 2018 Pew Research study found newspapers still make significantly more revenue from the print advertisements on their pages than on digital platforms — 56 percent of their revenue, according to the study.

But for Mike Palm, the executive editor of Uniontown’s Herald-Standard, his paper is choosing print for a different reason: competition.

“When you’re trying to compete in a digital world, you’re competing with more [media outlets]. The Tribune, the Post-Gazette, all the TV stations, the Observer-Reporter — in the digital realm all those become competitors,” Palm said, speaking before his paper’s owner, Ogden, purchased the Washington Observer-Reporter last week.

“In the newspaper realm — in hard copy– we have competitors, but in this area, there’s not much,” he said. 

Palm’s publisher, Michael Scott, has been with Ogden for 19 years and believes Ogden made the right decision, albeit through a series of difficult choices, when they changed their priorities from online back to print after buying the paper in 2017. That’s when Rebecca Devereaux and her colleagues in the visual media department were let go.

Credit David Smith / 100 Days in Appalachia

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100 Days in Appalachia

“Calkins [Media] was focused on digital,” Scott said, referring to the paper’s previous owner, “and we’re focused on print. Having a good, solid print product, it comes with a good, solid business model where digital does not, and in order to keep the content the level we firmly believe we should be at for a local newspaper, we need to be [in] print.”

Scott estimated the Herald-Standard’s current circulation to be approximately 50,000 and said they have 115 distribution racks throughout their coverage area. Calkins Media had previously removed all of the racks.

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100 Days in Appalachia

Scott believes newspapers made a mistake when “they offered their product for free” online. Yet, paywalls have not proven to be the answer for rural markets either.

“Newspapers have not made money online. Their revenues have been flat as a whole and that includes the larger regional newspapers like the Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News,” Ryfe said.

According to the Pew Research Center’s 2016 State of the Media Report, weekday print circulation in 2015 still made up 78 percent of a newspaper’s distribution. Fifty-one percent of adults who choose to read a newspaper do so in a print-only format, compared to 5 percent who prefer digital-only.

But those findings aren’t conclusive for the industry as a whole. In the same report, Pew found audiences are still gathering a large portion of their news from online sources when compared to the print newspaper. Regardless of whether a consumer first saw an article on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, only 20 percent of the original content came from a daily newspaper, while 25 percent came from radio and 28 percent came from digital publications and apps.

While the Herald-Standard is doubling down on print, its neighbors to the north like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review are betting on digital, but author and New York University journalism professor Samuel Freedman said those publications will have to find a way to make readers want to pay.

“You need to make the content strong enough that people want to pay for it,” Freedman said of the success of online paywalls. “What can you provide to your [readers and advertisers] that they can’t get anywhere else?”

The Counter Argument

With all of the external pressures on the industry, whether a newspaper is family-owned or held by an investment firm can be irrelevant. Statistics may indicate a reduction in the size of local newsrooms and, in turn, a reduction in local news coverage when they’re gobbled up by larger corporations, but that isn’t always the case.

“There’s nothing magical about local ownership,” Freedman said. “It is about who owns the paper. [The] problem isn’t that they’re outsiders, it is if there’s no commitment towards journalism.”

A former New York Times columnist and reporter, Freedman pointed to billionaire Glen Taylor who bought Minneapolis’ Star-Tribune as an owner who has aggressively worked to grow the audience of his paper, vowing to make it a “statewide” publication. 

Freedman agreed that there should be concern over media conglomerates buying up all of the publications in one geographic area, since history has shown they often have the “short-term” goal of debt cutting rather than growth. But as a former writer for New Jersey’s Courier News, owned by Gannett and part of the USA Today Network, Freedman said his own experience wasn’t that of drastic cuts.

“Everyone hated Gannett [at the time], but we were never removed [from a job] and were never strained for resources,” Freedman said.

Some local newsrooms today are finding benefits to being owned by the same large media company. Ellwood City Ledger managing editor Patrick O’Shea noted he utilizes a type of “network journalism” with the Beaver County Times.

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100 Days in Appalachia

As a former employee of the nearby paper, O’Shea said he has previously established relationships at the Times and he will often use local and regional stories from their reporters to fill his pages at the Ledger rather than national news. He said this type of resource sharing has been valuable for him. 

According to Ryfe, this is common practice when chains buy local newspapers. “These companies buy up papers in a geographic area so they can ring different kinds of efficiencies out of the chain. That means they share content across the newspapers.”

If There’s Still Hope Despite Ownership Then What’s the Big Deal?

When newspapers are bought by a larger conglomerate, the regional approach they sometimes implement with their coverage can lead to resentment from local residents.

Joyce Blaho, a former marketing and advertising employee of the Herald-Standard in Uniontown, believes the paper has quashed its local content with their extended Mon Valley coverage.

“The paper isn’t the same since being bought out by the Nuttings,” she said, referring to the owners of Ogden Newspaper Inc. Blaho isn’t alone in her newfound discontent.

Credit David Smith / 100 Days in Appalachia

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100 Days in Appalachia

Sara Meyer, who works at the Free Carnegie Library in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, doesn’t read the local Daily Courier because she believe it is “too depressing.” For her, the coverage is unappealing, too many stories about car crashes and arrests.

“Every patron that comes in tells me a story,” Meyer said, who prefers to see more human interest stories in her daily newspaper. “Something like that would help balance all the depressing news.”

Meyer, who has a brother-in-law that works at the Herald-Standard, is empathic, though. She said she understands that local newsrooms don’t have enough manpower to successfully cover the area. Yet, she still can’t bring herself to purchase either paper regularly.

“I can’t justify buying it when I can get everything online,” she said.

Residents’ complaints throughout the Greater Pittsburgh Area echoed Meyer and Blaho’s. ‘The content is poor.’ ‘The paper isn’t representative of the neighborhood.’ ‘A subscription expired and the product wasn’t worth renewal.’ One elderly Aliquippa woman did admit she still reads The Beaver County Times, but “only for the obituaries.” 

If residents are not buying their local newspapers, local publishers can’t afford to stay in business. Even more ironic is a number of people in these communities interviewed for this story admitted while they don’t read their local newspaper, they’d be more upset if the paper closed its doors entirely.

And that is the paradoxical problem local newspapers are facing today: people want them, but they don’t want to pay for them.

“[Readers are] expressing a kind of ambivalence. They value journalism and yet, relatively few of them are willing to pay enough money to sustain this journalism in their community,” Ryfe said.

O’Shea has been the managing editor of the Ellwood City Ledger since the GateHouse Media merger in June 2017.

He said there were 5 staffers in the Ledger’s newsroom at the time. Now, it is operated by O’Shea along with one other full-time reporter, a part-timer and an 80-year-old contributing writer. The paper itself is laid out in Austin, Texas, at New Media’s Center for News and Design– a design hub that serves 90 daily newspapers and 203 weekly papers, according to their website.

O’Shea said he’s not sure if any of the Ledger’s 2,500 readers are aware of the staffing reductions that have taken place under GateHouse’s ownership, but said the lack of empathy between readers and newsrooms “plays a role” in some of the hardships facing the newspaper industry. Residents are “almost always understanding” once the situation is discussed, O’Shea said, but those conversations can be few and far between.

Ideally, O’Shea would like to utilize additional staff to help allocate time to tackle more in-depth stories, but said he isn’t holding out hope for the increased resources.

“If it were up to a local administration, I think there might be more chance of that happening,” he said, “but unfortunately, when you are part of a larger organization, the attention isn’t really there.”

“This is a service the [residents] rely on. This is a business they rely on,” he said. O’Shea believes if the paper were to shut down, “it would leave a serious hole in the community.”

The only problem is someone still has to pay for the news.

This story was supported by The Pittsburgh Pitch, a project of 100 Days in Appalachia and the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University.

Robert Wuthnow tells the Daily Yonder it’s important to look beyond simplistic characterizations to understand how rural America might influence the nation’s political future.

Robert Wuthnow’s new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is a distillation of the Princeton sociologist’s decade of research regarding rural communities. Wuthnow, along with a team of researchers, conducted hundreds of interviews with people living in small towns, on farms, and in rural communities in an attempt to better understand social, cultural and political dynamics. Professor Wuthnow is the Gerhard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University. His many books include American Misfits and The Making of Middle-Class Respectability, Small-Town America, and Remaking the Heartland (all published by Princeton University Press).  

In 2013 the Daily Yonder published an excerpt of Wuthnow’s Small Town America. This time, we interviewed the professor via telephone. A transcript (edited slightly for length) appears below. 

Bryce Oates: At the Daily Yonder, we cover a lot of economic and social trends, as well as disparities, related to rural America. We see from the stories we cover and from the economic data an aging rural population, people who are less healthy, slower or flat economic growth, a lack of economic opportunity in some rural places. Are those some of the trends that got you interested in the topic?  

Robert Wuthnow: I started working on questions about rural America about a decade ago after having spent many years as a sociologist working on topics from religion to culture to politics to history. I grew up in a small town in Kansas. My father was a farmer, my mother was a school teacher. I’ve always had a professional interest, and continued affinity and affection, for that part of the country, for rural communities, for farmers, for small towns and small-town people. So, I started to study the economic trends, the demographic trends and so forth. That led to a project focusing on the region between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains, then a larger project nationwide, a project studying farmers in particular.  

This book, The Left Behind, is a distillation of what I found. It’s a shorter book written primarily for a non-specialty audience that pulls together some of the main conclusions for all of that research. I was able to draw on more than a thousand qualitative interviews, along with the quantitative data, that my team put together. We had a lot of content, a lot of rich perspective, from people in every state, every region. I was most taken with the loyalty, with the way rural people expressed such pride and identity with their specific communities. They identify so closely with their local schools, their football team, the feeling that there are some concerns but a general affection for the place they live. They believe strongly that this is a way of life that is valuable and worth protecting. People love the familiarity of their communities, the security of knowing a lot of people personally, the ambience no matter whether it’s hill country or prairie or grasslands. Those are the kinds of attachments that they feel deeply, even in their bones, for their rural communities.  

Oates: Did you notice any differences between people who grew up in the area, had ancestors who lived in the communities and the people who were newer arrivals?  

Wuthnow: Oh, yes. The newcomers realize that they’re still newcomers, and that they’ve only lived there for 10 or 15 years. And they weren’t always integrated into the community. This was also, incidentally, an issue related to immigration. There are lots of rural communities where the local labor force is made up primarily of immigrant newcomers, whether that’s working in meatpacking, or picking apples, or working on dairy farms, or as construction workers. That’s seen as having both pluses and minuses to the old timers. The minuses are expressed as, yes, our community is changing, these people are different from us, we’re not sure who they are. The pluses are related to population decline. If you’re community has been losing people for many years as residents, or to help on the farm, to perform the labor, you’re glad they’re there. That’s important in the political moment, with all of the talk of the border wall, the tough talk about immigrants and crime, there’s a perception out there in the journalistic world that “it’s just those stupid rural people who are the problem,” that they’re the ones that don’t want immigrants. And that’s not true at all. There are plenty of quotes from small town officials, farmers, community leaders, say that there are some problems, but we also understand that there is value in many of our communities for immigration.  

Oates: How did you go about collecting the data you used, the interviews you gathered, to measure the rural opinions and trends you were tracking?  

Wuthnow: A lot of the time, information is collected in a county-by-county way. That wasn’t ideal for my purposes, as I was looking for more community-specific trends. So we started with the census data on incorporated places. There are approximately 19,000 towns, boroughs, and municipalities in the United States. 18,000 of those places have fewer than 25,000 residents. Out of those, 14,000 are officially designated as rural. These are places not contiguous with metropolitan communities. From there, I was able to further draw distinctions between towns that are near interstate highways, for instance, or county seat towns, towns with a liberal arts college, is there a larger town near yours, how does the town score with respect to USDA’s amenities index? So we spent a lot of time on quantitative analysis, then we interviewed people in a way to maximize diversity between the variety of economic characteristics, the kinds of agriculture present, whether that’s a corn area or a wheat region or a rice area. Is it a mining community, a tourist community, a town based on government services, or what? So we went about maximizing this type of diversity, and then tried to equalize the number of men and women, to represent racial groups on the same overall percentage as the nation, and then, further, a range of ages, occupations and economic classes.  

Oates: With regards to that diversity you point out, whether that’s among African Americans in the rural Southeast, Native Americans of the West and Great Plains, or Latino and Hispanic pockets, did you notice significant differences between the way these communities thought about their towns than did white people?  

Wuthnow: One of the most interesting differences, not surprising but revealing, is that in mixed race communities, here I’m talking about the South, the story of race relations when told by white people was basically one of progress. They would say that “we used to have a totally segregated town, a segregated school, and now that’s fixed. We never had African Americans on the town council, and now they’re represented.” Whites were telling an upbeat story about change and embracing inclusiveness.  

The African Americans we spoke with were certainly aware of those improvements, but to the black population, if the glass was half full for white people, then the glass was half empty for African Americans. They didn’t necessarily put it that way, but they pointed out how far progress still needs to go, to move beyond tokenism and inequality, to move beyond mere tolerance and toward basic understanding. The reality, in many cases for African-Americans, is that we found severe economic disparities and challenges, and difficulty integrating in communities, difficulty gaining political representation.  

The disparities were also evident in agricultural communities. The case in farming is that a few farms have gotten larger, machinery costs, the costs of operating a farm have grown dramatically, and small farmers and the sharecroppers have gotten pushed out. In many cases, it’s the African Americans, who have much smaller plots of land that were pushed out.  

It was also interesting, talking to farmers and to immigrant farm laborers, to see the difference of opinion about machinery and technology. There were a number of farmers who say, “we have invested $500,000 in this combine, $250,000 in our self-guided GPS tractor, we’re not about to let an immigrant drive that machine.” But those same farmers didn’t want to keep their older equipment, and have higher labor costs. They were trying to do all they can to save labor costs. The immigrant laborers, of course, didn’t always share that opinion.  

Oates: The title, The Left Behind, what was your thinking about choosing that title? I’m thinking that a lot of rural people I know, they certainly choose to remain in their communities.  

Wuthnow: They certainly do. And some comments I’ve gotten about the title, that sometimes rubs people the wrong way. But we did choose the title because a lot rural people did acknowledge that they were left behind. That doesn’t mean they regret it. They choose to remain. But they were literally left behind because their siblings had moved on, their children had moved on. They were the ones that stuck around to run the family farm, to help out the aging parents or other family members. Now these same people often were encouraged, especially in the case of their children, to move on and pursue other opportunities.  

This story is often told as living in two separate worlds from there, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Rural families know people who live in urban areas, whether that be their children or their families or their friends. They get along, they love one another, they travel back and forth. They often vote the same way and think the same way. There’s this tendency to not only aggravate the Republican versus Democrat polarity, but also the rural versus urban distinction, that certainly troubles me.  

Oates: Yes. That certainly troubles me, too. This constant narrative, among some journalists, not all journalists, but a lot of them, about the angry and resentful rural masses in Trump Country. There are certainly a lot of people who feel angry and upset about their state of affairs, but I speak every day to rural people who work hard to improve their communities, who have a progressive outlook, who embrace diversity. But that doesn’t get picked up by the pundits, the politicians, the journalists, who seem to be drawing boundaries around rural versus urban. I don’t think that there’s some kind of unbridgeable divide. I’m not sure what you think about that.  

Wuthnow: No, no. I don’t think so either. I will say on the question that often comes up, are rural people now considering they made a mistake, have they changed their minds about voting for Trump, are they now ready to vote for Democrats or favor progressive issues. Yes, rural people are not dumb. If trade policies are being proposed that don’t help them or tax policy is passed that harms them, sure, they understand what’s at stake.  

But to ask rural people, who’ve in some communities been voting Republican since the Civil War, to ask them to turn around and say, “that Democratic candidate is for me,” that’s harder. I realize this especially in a book I wrote about Kansas and another one about Texas, that those political loyalties run in families. They also run in local institutions, school board, county commissions. I think that the change that’s likely to happen, just like it was so often in the past, is going to happen in the primaries. In a Republican community, are you going to select a Tea Party Republican or a Trump Republican or a more moderate Republican. You certainly saw that a few years ago when the Tea Party Republicans were winning a lot of elections, and then now you can see that swinging back toward the moderate Republicans in a lot of places.  

Oates: On the Democratic side, though, like the place where I grew up, West Missouri, but also, Northeast Missouri, parts of Kentucky and Southern Illinois over through Tennessee and West Virginia. There’s a lot of rural places where all of the county commissioners, the sheriff, the local officials are Democrats. But they haven’t elected a Democratic candidate nationally since Bill Clinton in the nineties. And the state legislatures in these states, they’ve gone wildly toward the Republican side. That’s happened in my adult lifetime, and it’s been a big change. Maybe not so much Kansas, with its history of Republican politics, but in a big area to the East.  

Wuthnow: Yes. Certainly there’s a strong history with the Democratic party in the South, up through Iowa, across Kentucky. The thing is that Republic victories at the national level have been going on for quite a while. Of course, there was Nixon’s Southern Strategy. In a lot of ways, Bill Clinton can be seen as an outlier, only breaking up the Republican hold on the Presidency for his two terms. And Obama did pick up some votes in those Democratic districts. But as you’ve identified, there has been a big split in the ways in which rural people view local politics compared with national politics. That’s also one of the virtues of our republic, to have a multi-leveled federal system where local politics still matter. Who you vote for county commissioner, or for school board, that matters. A lot of times, that local situation can be the counterweight to what is happening on the federal or the national level.  

To use Kansas as an example, to watch Governor Sam Brownback to become such an unpopular figure throughout the state, rural communities, too, have learned what happened with his experiment in tax policies and so forth. That really impacted school funding, local governments, so many people who supported him initially started to speak out against him and call for a new approach.  

Oates: In terms of policies and policy opinions at the federal level, did you notice anything significant? Are there rural policies that are very popular, very unpopular? I cover rural people who, even those who vote Republican, have been outraged about the Trump positions on the farm bill, say, and about their proposals for slashing USDA budgets. And rural people I speak with are nearly all supportive of Social Security, of Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are very important in rural communities.  

Wuthnow: Yes, well the time when I was conducting the interviews, when my team and I were gathering data, this was during the Obama Administration. And there was certainly outrage, but digging into it, the outrage was mostly symbolic, it focused on “Washington being out of touch, being distant, making life harder.” Rather than helping, they’re interfering with our lives. The people at that level, they were not speaking to policies. On the other hand, many people we did speak with who were very interested in certain federal policies.  

This was the case with, of course, farmers and with local town managers, more so than mayors. And then when these policies were important they were related to certain occupations, certain industries. If you’re talking to retirees, Social Security and Medicare is the big issue. If you’re talking to schoolteachers and administrators, education policy is the big issue. County commissioners and town managers see economic development funding, tax policies, right-to-work laws as the most important. For the farmers, who were the most informed and articulate about policy, and they have to be because of their close ties with USDA, this varied some, but there was generally overwhelming support for federally subsidized crop insurance.  

In the grain regions, the farmers were mostly ambivalent about GMOs, about Monsanto, about what should or shouldn’t be done about that. Dairy farmers were of course tuned in to what’s happening with food safety issues. There was quite a bit of interest about organic farming and those trends. But generally, there was a lot of ambivalence about the farm bill itself. There was certainly a lot of ambivalence about trade policies. Pretty much people were for trade agreements and free trade, but not everyone. There were some people who vocally support protection of local markets. Overall, I was impressed not only with how knowledgeable farmers were, but how engaged they were. We spoke with many farmers who regularly visit their legislators, who participate in organizations and commissioners, who are busy all the time working and taking issues on positions in their industry. And they still had the complaint that’s been the same from the very beginning, that even among some very large farmers, they understand they are relatively small players when compared with the largesse of agribusiness companies. They often don’t have as much of a voice that they wanted. When they said Washington was broken, they mean that they have a feeling that Washington is in the pocket of big agribusiness rather than family farmers. 

This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder and distributed through 100 Days in Appalachia, which is a project of The WVU Media Innovation Center, The Daily Yonder and West Virginia Public Broadcasting.