Why Rural Issues Are Miscovered in the Media

Methodology

In-depth interviews and a year-long media scan

This report draws on findings from in-depth interviews with rural experts, activists, and journalists, as well as a media scan that analyzes coverage of rural America in national and regional news media.

In-depth interviews

The Hattaway team conducted hour-long, one-on-one conversations with rural experts and journalists from national and local outlets, including those who do and do not currently report on rural issues. Interviewees included local journalists who report on the communities where they live, urban-based journalists who cover rural America for national outlets, and rural community members and advocates. Conversations explored interviewees’ experiences with and perceptions of national media coverage, how they decide what to cover, the biggest challenges they face, and what advice they would give journalists seeking to report more accurately on rural realities.

Because tribal communities are integral to rural America, the team worked to include Native voices and media outlets in interviews. A full review of media coverage of Native Americans and tribal communities, however, was beyond the scope of this project.

Media scan

The team selected two samples of media content, both drawn from coverage published between December 3, 2018 and December 3, 2019. The first was a set of 150 validated, relevant articles containing the keyword “rural” from the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, Fox News, CNN, HuffPost, the New York Post, and the Seattle Times. The second was 150 articles with the highest social echo — combined shares on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit — containing “rural” near “United States,” “America,” or “U.S.”

Rural issues are not easy to find with a simple keyword search: health stories use the word “health,” education stories use “education,” and rural places carry different names across all fifty states. That range makes identifying, aggregating, and tracking — let alone analyzing — rural media difficult.

Common terms and definitions

A few terms recur throughout this report, and “rural” is worth defining on its own:

Local journalist

Journalists who live in the community or region where they work and report for media organizations with a predominantly local or regional audience.

National journalist

Journalists who work outside of rural-based or rural-focused outlets, with an emphasis on larger, more widely circulated, and urban-based outlets — such as USA Today, National Public Radio, or the Washington Post.

Media

Any content from print, radio, television, or digital news outlets.

Rural

Depending on the definition used, the total rural population ranges from 60 million, or 19.3% (U.S. Census), to 46 million, or 14% (OMB). This report does not rely on a single definition; when it says “rural,” it includes Tribal Nations and communities located in rural regions of the U.S., and defers to interviewees’ own knowledge and experience of rural and tribal life. Rural conditions vary widely — as do the hundreds of Tribal Nations and communities across the country.

Back to top

In-depth insight 1

Structural decline in news media has hit rural reporting hardest

Over the past 15 years, changes in the media industry have caused more than one in five newspapers nationally to close, and over 500 newspapers to close or merge in rural communities specifically. Digital technology makes it feasible for newsrooms to operate almost anywhere — but business models and industry trends have concentrated the media landscape in a handful of large cities, while rural areas face the greatest threat of neglect.

The decline of local media has changed how rural communities see themselves

As local newspapers disappear, rural residents increasingly turn to larger, urban-based outlets for news — outlets that have often reinforced negative stereotypes about rural areas, if they cover rural at all. Interviewees pointed to research showing that how people see themselves represented shapes personal and community development; the decline of local papers means fewer voices are pushing back on the dominant national narrative.

Direct funding and media collaboration can help — with caveats

Some organizations now fund local journalism directly, or support media collaboration in which a single parent company backs several smaller outlets. Interviewees welcomed the added resources but flagged real drawbacks, including local outlets having to conform to standardized story formats that limit the kinds of stories they can run.

Back to top

In-depth insight 3

Post-2016 coverage left lasting distrust

Local journalists and rural residents remain distrustful of national outlets, largely because of a perceived role in perpetuating stereotypes. Since 2016, local journalists have been repeatedly contacted for stereotypical “rural” sources — the farmer, the coal miner, the Trump supporter — even when those figures didn’t reflect the community’s actual makeup.

Media scan finding

Stereotypical coverage travels further on social media

Agriculture employed just 6% of the rural workforce in 2017 — yet farmers and Trump loomed far larger in the stories that traveled furthest online than they did in the broader sample of national coverage.

Even where national outlets are covering rural America more representatively than they were right after the 2016 election, stories that lean on stereotype still travel furthest on social platforms — and may be disproportionately shaping the national conversation about rural areas.

Media scan finding

Coverage skews negative

Among “Rural Realities” stories with the highest social echo, more than half were negative in tone, with words like “crisis” or “struggle” appearing in headlines about suicide rates, hospital closures, and other health-care inadequacies. In the top-outlets sample, about a third of “Rural Realities” stories skewed negative.

Newsrooms rarely mirror the communities they cover

Interviewees pointed to a lack of rural voices in newsrooms as a root cause of inaccurate coverage: without those relationships or that lived familiarity, national journalists bring their own biases and are more likely to miss the story entirely.

Local journalists feel used, not credited

Many local journalists described national reporters calling to ask for sources that would confirm a story already decided on, rather than to learn what was actually happening.

A few local journalists also mentioned times in which their work was picked up by national outlets without giving proper credit, or instances of journalists from these outlets reaching out to ask for connections to sources so they could rewrite the piece themselves, again without properly crediting the work.

Although many journalists at national outlets said a lack of time or funding kept them from covering rural issues in depth, freelance and local journalists believed that claim was often disingenuous.

Back to top

Recommendations from respondents

What interviewees asked for, in their own words

At the end of every conversation, interviewees were asked how to increase the quality and quantity of representative, nuanced rural coverage. One point echoed throughout: national media should accurately represent all of us — rural America, Tribal Nations, and the people who call these places home are no exception.

For journalists

• Report from a rural point of view, not toward a “rural issue.”

  “I mean, part of it is trying to bust out the idea that so much of what we talk about is a rural issue or an urban issue. It’s not that. It’s just the fact that you’re approaching this particular story from a rural point of view. If you’re talking about crime, are you just going to have people from Chicago, and Boston, and New York participating in talking about crime? Or are you making space for the idea that you do have someone [in a rural community] who has absolutely as much concern about crime, but they just happen to live in a much more rural part of the country.” — Editor at national outlet

• Seek out the full diversity of rural America — geography, race, ethnicity, culture, history, economy.

  One freelance journalist, covering Native American communities specifically, pointed to LGBTQ voices as one of the perspectives most often left out entirely: “Just like what the struggles are for LGBTQ folks on the [reservation] … We live in the modern world and it’s not a very friendly place for LGBTQ people … I want to hear about this person’s struggle and they really want to send a message to the people coming after them, other young people. How to navigate the world and how to gain strength.” — Freelance journalist covering Native American issues

• Lead with opportunity and innovation, not only with challenge.

  “But what you would want is for people to look at small towns for what they are, which are cool places to live. And much more diverse than cities to my way of looking, or my experience is that’s the case. And good places not only for people to grow up, but also good places for adults to live and prosper.” — Local journalist

For editors

• Commit to a consistent presence and build real, lasting trust in rural and tribal communities.

  “What we undertook this year is that we promised that wherever we went this year, we would go back to in 2020. So it’s a way of us trying to build a relationship with an area which is new to us, but also try and build some trust. The idea is that we’re just not going to turn up for a few days, get what we want and leave. We’re trying to be respectful and say, ‘This is part of a relationship. We look forward to seeing you again next year and maybe we talk about something different. Maybe we don’t.’ But it’s a way of trying to say to those communities and those folks that we’re not just coming in and splash-and-dash routine, which again, national media is very good at doing.” — Editor at national outlet

• Push reporters to find and publish stories that challenge, rather than confirm, stereotypes of rural America.

  “I think that Americans and journalists tend to forget that rural communities are full of people of color, that rural communities mean Native American tribes, that there is an incredibly large immigrant community, an incredibly diverse series of immigrant communities in towns across the Midwest and the plains who don’t get heard from a lot, whose politics and priorities do not get a lot of views and a lot of attention.” — National journalist

• Partner with local and freelance journalists, or contract them directly, instead of duplicating their work.

  “[Stories are being covered] but it’s missing the nuance, and I think that’s where regional journalists and independent journalists can really benefit news outlets because of that. The problem is you’ll see the New York Times or the Washington Post have someone parachute, when you could easily assign this to a journalist that is already there.” — Local/freelance journalist

For national outlets, local newsrooms, and investors

• Build partnerships between national and local newsrooms, with local journalists checking national assumptions.

  “We’re working in collaboration with these [local] teams, and they’ll put us right if they just feel that we’re making an assumption about a particular viewpoint. So the relationships with the local news are helping us avoid those mistakes. They’re the check on our national prejudices and we trust them — we obviously respect the work they do — and that’s hopefully making our product stronger.” — Editor at national outlet

  “Instead of putting national reporters on a plane and photographers on a plane and sending them to Florida, [we] have the local journalists covering it. And you’ve got much better coverage. So it actually made quite a bit of sense and we were able to make use of a lot of the reporting that otherwise would not have seen the light of day, including rural reporting [and] deep red state reporting, that other national media did not have.” — Editor at national outlet

• Dedicate the resources for reporters to actually spend time on the ground.

  “If they’re able to actually come here and visit, that would make the biggest difference. We see the change in people all the time. It just makes a huge difference if you can actually go into a place and hear from the people who live there, look them in the eye and have a real conversation, a real human connection with them.” — Communications director, rural NGO

  “90% of journalism is showing up and the story is always different when you actually go there. You talk to people, you reach out broadly for all kinds of perspectives. It’s always different and it’s always more interesting.” — National journalist

• Diversify national newsrooms with journalists who have real rural know-how.

  “I think there might be some comparability to the early Black reporters who went into national journalism … They were able to get stories that they didn’t get before because they had somebody who would understand things that people who hadn’t had that background and experience in understanding wouldn’t be able to get.” — Local journalist

Back to top

Conclusion

This report sits alongside Aspen CSG’s ongoing Thrive Rural Framework and library of rural-focused reports and tools, which take on the same narrative gap from other angles.