I’ve been wanting for some time to address a topic dear to my heart: the ever-shrinking news coverage of rural America. For a while I held off because the idea felt too much like a nostalgic lament. It is certainly that, in part. But I decided to write because this is a perfect moment for news organizations to revisit their wide abandonment of agriculture and rural issues, and to take steps to better represent this part of American life.
A few days ago my wife, Geneva Overholser, and I attended the funeral for George Anthan, my friend and former colleague and one of the best agriculture journalists of our time. I had the good fortune of working with George for many years at The Des Moines Register, including three years when he was my boss in The Register’s Washington Bureau. It’s startling to think that George’s nearly four-decade-long body of path-breaking work covering federal farm programs and the agricultural industry is now a lost beat. But that is mostly the case, and it unfortunately reflects a larger truth: American newspapers have moved ever farther from reporting on farming and rural life. My sense is that the same trend is true for TV news as well.
Something else made me want to write about this topic, and that’s this year’s political campaign and our growing understanding of the deep fault lines that are alienating Americans from each another. I wonder if one piece of the disaffection visible in rural areas isn’t the fact that many no longer see themselves represented in news coverage at the state and national levels. Continue reading The vanishing coverage of rural America