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.
Think how often, for those old enough to remember, farm or rural stories would make the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post in the 1970s and 1980s, and how often they are there today. Might this be part of the reason why rural America feels separated from the “elite” crowd running the country? Or think what The Des Moines Sunday Register felt like in its day, with its fat farm section filled with classified ads, multiple enterprise agriculture stories, all delivered door-to-door in every Iowa county. Farmers and rural residents could see they were part of the business and political power establishment in the state, with national and even international significance.
Do a side-by-side comparison of farm/rural newspaper coverage in the 1970s to what it is now, and you’d think rural America had mostly disappeared.
Some of the diminished coverage is understandable. Perhaps the biggest change is the nature of the news business. Well before the flowering of the internet, many newspapers were retreating from their rural coverage as the era of statewide and major regional outlets came to a close. In the 1990s, for example, The Des Moines Register abandoned its statewide distribution and refashioned itself as a central Iowa newspaper, focusing on the growing Des Moines metropolitan area. Other powerhouse agriculture coverage suffered the same fate at places like the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Kansas City Star. In his 2001 book, “The Invisible Farm,” Thomas Pawlick said the number of daily newspapers with full-time farm writers declined 62 percent between 1975 and 1995. In the last decade, newspapers’ eroding business model brought on by things digital has quickened this trend.
Meanwhile, the farm/rural beats at places like the Times and Post simply ended. Further diminishing rural coverage was the dismantling of regional bureaus for major print publications, both newspapers and news magazines. Correspondents in places like Chicago, Kansas City and Denver would regularly venture outside these cities to report on the farms and small towns in their regions. For the most part this too is gone.
The second reality is that rural America has lost a significant chunk of its population. In Iowa, for example, the rural portion of the state’s population fell nearly in half between 1900 and 1990, to 39 percent. (The Census Bureau defines “rural” as open areas and towns with up to 2,500 people.) Nationally, rural residents make up about 19 percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau.
But that’s still one in five people. And the farming and agribusiness industry they represent remains a vibrant – and obviously vital – part of the American economy. A recent drive along the back roads from southern Missouri to Minneapolis was revealing, not just in the health of this year’s bumper corn and soybean crops, but in the overall health of the rural landscape. Farming and agribusiness is a $177 billion industry nationally (a number that continues to rise steadily), and accounts for about 5 percent of the overall economy. The course of food policy, of food security, and farm trade is hugely important. Yet news coverage has fallen significantly.
So much has been lost here. For starters, consider the amazing investigative stories no longer being reported. I think of the two Pulitzer prizes won by The Register’s Jim Risser, on the scandalous sale of dirty grain by exporters, and on the environmental damage caused by farming. And another Pulitzer prize by The Register’s Tom Knudson on the scourge of farming accidents. And still one more by David Peterson, whose searing photos documented the pain of the farm crisis in the 1980s. Then too are the two Pulitzer finalists by George Anthan, on the infamous “fecal soup” in poultry processing and on disappearing farmland. It was with George that I did my own best reporting – a 99-county examination of the Iowa farmers receiving the highest federal farm subsidies, a project that took months of digging.
Watchdog reporting of this kind is vital. But just as important is all-purpose enterprise reporting, on agribusiness and on the tens of thousands of small towns that help make up the nation’s bedrock.
Am I overstating the case here? Perhaps. My impression is that my alma mater, The Register, still pays extensive attention to rural Iowa. The Chicago Tribune recently published a major investigation of conditions in Illinois’ 900 hog-confinement facilities. New internet-era reporting organizations have emerged, some occasionally focusing on agriculture and other rural issues. It’s true, as well, that farm and rural coverage isn’t the only arena where coverage has declined. Put statehouse reporting in the same category.
In general, though, it’s clear that major news organizations’ shift away from farming and rural concerns is massive. And I believe it’s overdone. Yes, the nation continues to become ever more urban, and that trend is probably going to continue. But it will never become as urban as coverage in the New York Times or Washington Post would suggest.
I think back to when, at The Register, George Anthan and Jim Risser were covering farm policy from Washington, and farm editor Don Muhm and colleagues Claudia Waterloo and Jerry Perkins were covering agriculture throughout the state. Or when Ward Sinclair at the Post or Keith Schneider of the Times was putting farming on the cover of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers. (In 1981, Sinclair did a six-part series for the Post on the industrialization of corn!) Imagine how the then-newspaper-subscribing Iowa farmer or small-town merchant saw himself or herself reflected in the life of the state and nation. Fast forward to today. Any wonder that rural Americans might feel increasingly separated from a big-city media that looks quite clueless about things that matter to the heartland?
I know some of the diminishment I write about here is not easily fixed, at least not anytime soon. The mission of many news organizations has changed; their resources have declined. It may take a new generation of entrepreneurs to fix this. But for now, I believe it’s time for a reconsideration of how the news business covers rural America. Newsrooms across the country are reorganizing themselves, establishing new beats, creating new verticals. It’s an opportune time to restore a focus on farming and small-town life, to better reflect the nation that we are.
Excellent piece, David. I believe you are correct that the invisibility of rural America in national coverage is contributing to anger at elites. I remember the tough time I had in the early 1980s as the Midwest editor of Pacific News Service getting newspapers to run our stories on agriculture and small towns. A top editor at the Milwaukee Journal told me, when I met him in his office, that he never wanted to run any stories about agriculture “because they always had words like ‘hundredweight’ in them!” As someone who has spent most of her life in the rural Midwest and is now in Los Angeles, I see how events and trends here get far more attention than equally important societal changes in rural America.
This is a thoughtful piece. The list of Pulitzer award topics, though, makes one wonder if the coverage contributed to rural population decline.