States expand authority of nurse practitioners and physicians assistants to increase health care in rural areas

The shortage of doctors and drug treatment in rural areas hamstrings efforts to fight the opioid epidemic. Medication-assisted therapy, which requires a prescription, is the most effective treatment. The Drug Enforcement Administration announced in late January that nurse practitioners and physician assistants can get a waiver that allows them to prescribe and dispense opioid maintenance drugs. But lawmakers in several states have gone a step further, seeking to expand the scope of practice for nurse practitioners and physician assistants in rural areas where there is often no doctor.

In Georgia, Republican Sen. Renee Unterman, chair of the Senate health committee, has introduced a bill that would give rural nurse practitioners more latitude to treat patients. Nine of the state's 159 counties have no physician, and dozens more have no pediatricians or obstetrician/gynecologists. "Proponents argue expanding the scope of practice for nurse practitioners could help fill in the health-care gaps in a growing state with increasing needs, especially with primary care. Nurse practitioners can also specialize in certain areas, such as pediatric care or mental health treatment," Jill Nolan reports for the Valdosta Daily Times.

In April 2017 the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill to let nurse practitioners to practice on their own after fulfilling a three-year, 3,600-hour formal agreement with a physician, Jan Murphy reports for Penn Live. "There are not enough doctors willing to practice in smaller communities and as older doctors retire, fewer new doctors are coming in to replace them," said the bill's sponsor, Republican Sen. Camera Bartolotta. "Thankfully, there is a solution that holds the promise of easing this looming health care catastrophe."

Texas passed two related bills in 2017: one that allows nurse practitioners in under-served areas to see Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Plan patients without a doctor's supervision, and one that allows APRNs and physician's assistants to sign death certificates. Nurse practitioners had protested having to pay up to six-figure contracts with doctors that would allow the nurse practitioners to treat patients and write prescriptions, Mariana Alfaro reports for The Texas Tribune.

Sinclair asks its stations' news directors to give to its PAC; journalism ethics experts object

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the nation's largest owner of TV stations, is asking some of its newsroom managers to contribute to its conservative-oriented political action committee, which some journalism ethics experts say is highly unusual and opens the door to an ethical breach.

Rebecca Hanson, Sinclair's senior vice president of strategy and policy, said the request for PAC funding wasn't unethical because it was only sent to newsroom managers, not reporters or anchors. The news directors "were solicited as a result of being part of our managerial level, not because of their role in editorial," Hanson told Paul Farhi of The Washington Post, and added that "participation is completely voluntary. There is no corporate pressure to participate and no consequence for not participating. It doesn’t put them in any ethical bind whatsoever."

But University of Wisconsin journalism professor and former TV news producer Lewis Friedland told Farhi that the request "violates every standard of conduct that has existed in newsrooms for the past 40 or 50 years" and said that news directors who donate are tacitly supporting the company's political agenda. "It would cause people to ask whether they’re being fair and balanced in their coverage," Friedland said. And news directors might feel pressured to contribute, and worry that refusal would be seen be company superiors as disloyal, Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told Farhi.

Sinclair owns 173 stations, and would grow with its pending $3.9 billion purchase of 42 owned or operated by Tribune Media. "The company is fighting to preserve an arcane rule adopted by the Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission last year that effectively enabled it and other big media companies to buy more stations. If Congress were to restore the old limits, or if a pending court challenge succeeds, it could complicate Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune," Farhi reports.

Sinclair has been criticized for partisan news coverage. In 2004 it wanted to air a documentary critical of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry the night before Election Day, but backed off after complaints. In 2012 it aired a half-hour news special critical of President Obama. In 2016 it reportedly ordered its stations to air news stories favorable to Donald Trump. In 2017 a Sinclair station in Montana refused to cover the story of U.S. Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte attacking a reporter, saying that he worked for a biased publication. And today, stations are told to air conservative commentaries from Sinclair executive Mark Hyman and former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn.

'Calls from Home' radio show connects inmates in Central Appalachian prisons with their faraway loved ones

Prisoners often get messages from loved ones in letters, but how about by radio? WMMT-FM in Whitesburg, Ky., has a unique show, "Calls From Home," that for 20 years has broadcast loved ones' recorded messages to inmates in nearby prisons. More than 5,000 men are incarcerated in six federal and state prisons in the range of WMMT, in Kentucky and Virginia.

Map shows primary signal coverage of WMMT-FM

It's no coincidence that so many prisons are located near Whitesburg. "Pitched as a new source of economic development amid coal power’s decline, prisons began sprouting up around Appalachia in the 1970s," Henry Gass reports for The Christian Science Monitor. "Most people in the community don’t have a problem with new prisons being built in the area . . . though they have grown skeptical of the promises of thousands of jobs."

However, "When prisons started coming in to the region . . . the inmate population and the local population were very much pitched against each other by the department of corrections and state officials," Rose Hackman of The Guardian reported in 2016, after interviewing Amelia Kirby, who started the program when she worked at WMMY, a service of the Appalshop arts-and-culture cooperative.

“We were told that the prisoners coming in were going to be the worst of the worst criminals. Then they were telling inmates they were coming to the last place on earth where violent and racist hillbillies lived,” Kirby told Hackman. “They really worked hard to create this kind of demonizing language. . . . We wanted to counter that narrative. The show is humanizing on both sides. It shows that we are not violent racists, and that people in prison are humans with families that love them. It’s difficult to hate someone when you hear their grandchild tell them they love them on the radio.”

Gass reports, "WMMT bills itself as 'a 24-hour voice of mountain people,' and as far as the station is concerned, if the inmates can tune in, then they are mountain people too." Elizabeth Sanders, WMMT's co-general manager and a producer of "Calls From Home," told him, "Anything we can do to help make the barriers between them and their families a little bit less, then we’re fulfilling part of our mission as the radio station here."

The radio messages are the only way some people can connect with their incarcerated loved ones because of difficulties finding transportation to the prison and the expense of calling a prison. It sometimes cost more than $10 per minute to call someone in prison until the Federal Communications Commission announced a rule in 2015 capping how much telecommunications companies can charge for such calls.

Iconic section of Blue Ridge Parkway shuts March 1-May 24

Linn Cove Viaduct in spring (Photo via Merritt McKinney)

If you're planning to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway to see spring blooms, you may have to take a detour or two. A signature stretch of the federal road, the Linn Cove Viaduct around Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, will be closed from March 1 until May 24, just before Memorial Day.

"A seven-mile section of the parkway will be completely closed to traffic. The section of the Tanawha hiking trail below the bridge will also be closed," Karen Chavez reports for the Asheville Citizen-Times. "A traffic detour will be put in place from Milepost 298.6 at Holloway Mountain Road to Milepost 305.1 at U.S. 221."

Chavez explains, "Road work at high elevations must take place in a small window between weather conditions suitable for paving projects, and to cause as little impact to the visitor season as possible, said parkway spokeswoman Leesa Brandon." Other parkway sections are closed or will be; for a real-time map, click here.

The repaving will be the first since the viaduct opened in 1987, completing construction of the 469-mile parkway from Shenandoah National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. "The views along the winding viaduct are a huge tourist draw to the parkway, which is the most visited site in the National Park Service. More than 16 million people visited the parkway last year," Chavez reports.

Trump budget for next fiscal year would cut some rural programs, subsidies to higher-income farmers

President Trump's proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 calls for a 16 percent decrease in Department of Agriculture spending. Bryce Oates reports for The Daily Yonder, "While the document is vague about some proposed changes, the budget cuts appear to be targeted primarily at Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and eligibility, changes to farm subsidies and crop insurance, decreases in conservation spending, and cuts to some Rural Development programs." SNAP, better known as food stamps, accounts for 80 percent of spending in the five-year Farm Bill.

Some of the proposed changes include:

• Some SNAP recipients would be required to work to keep benefits. The budget also proposes delivering non-perishable foods such as "shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal" in a box to SNAP recipients, rather than allowing them to choose what foods fit their family at the grocery store, reports Helena B. Evitch of Politico. "The proposal was so out of left field that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke."
• Subsidies would be eliminated for higher-income farmers and "overly generous" crop insurance premiums to farmers and payments made to private sector insurance companies would be reduced. Underwriting gains for insurance companies would be capped at 12 percent.
• Community Connect, the rural broadband grants program, would maintain $30 million in funding, but broadband development loans would be cut 15 percent to $23 million and the distance learning program would be cut by 10 percent to $24 million.
• The Farm Service Agency, the Risk Management Agency, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service would be combined into a Farm Production and Conservation office. 
• Funds are included for the Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs division to help increase agricultural exports.
• Funds would be reduced for the Economic Research Service by eliminating what the plan calls low-priority research already being conducted in the private sector or nonprofits.
• Wildfires would be treated like other natural disasters like hurricanes, floods or tornadoes. The rationale: The cost of fighting wildfires last year hit a record $2.4 billion, which meant money had to be taken away from wildfire prevention programs to pay for it. 
• The Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant Program would be eliminated.
• Conservation programs would see reduced funding, though the details weren't included in the proposed budget.
• Interest payments to electric and telecommunications utilities would be eliminated. 

"The Trump administration’s budget proposal appears to be significantly different than what could emerge from the Congressional budget process," Oates reports. "Just last week, the House and Senate agreed to guidelines on a two-year funding package for federal spending that includes increases in both military and domestic spending programs. The size and scope of those budget details will be negotiated by House and Senate appropriators over the next several weeks."

Kansas' likely oldest working journalist dies at 102

Brown, writing a column (Wichita Eagle photo by Beccy Tanner)

When Protection Press community columnist Bonnie Brown gathered news for "Bonnie's Blog" in the weekly paper, she went on foot; she gave up driving when she was 98. And in her eight years of writing for the Press, she only missed two deadlines — one last year when Protection was evacuated for wildfires, and a few weeks ago when she caught a cold. But the upbeat woman who many think was Kansas' oldest working columnist was found dead in her apartment Saturday morning, just 11 days before her 103rd birthday. Her son, Rodney Brown, said her cold had turned into pneumonia. "In her last column, published this past week, Mrs. Brown wrote that she wasn’t feeling 'up to par yet but hope I am on the last mile … If all goes well, I may make it for my next birthday. One never knows what’s in store for any of us,'" Beccy Tanner reports for The Wichita Eagle.

Town of Protection, in Comanche County, Kansas (Wikipedia map)

It's not just Brown's passing that's worthy of mourning, but her increasingly rare style of gathering news: the 4-foot, 5-inch columnist gathered news "the old-fashioned way — with shoe leather and an inquiring mind" as she beat the pavement every day gathering local news in the town of 500, Tanner reports in a different story for The Eagle. "Her column style — of reporting on who was in Protection, who went to visit who, what so-and-so is doing now – is a style of journalism that began to disappear in daily, and then weekly newspapers, in the 1970s and 1980s." But it remains in many weeklies.

Protection Press Editor Susan Edmonston told Tanner, "People are going to miss her but she was such a positive, upbeat person, we think she is up there, walking around, talking to everybody and still getting the news."

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article199593154.html#storylink=cpy

Interior aims to improve big-game management and conservation, expand hunting opportunities in West

Pronghorn antelope (Photo via Wikipedia)

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order Feb. 9 "aimed at improving wildlife management and conservation while expanding opportunities for big-game hunting across the West," Gary Harmon reports for The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colo.

The Interior Department will work with state and local agencies to study migration habits of elk, mule deer and pronghorn and find ways to improve their habitat in priority states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

The order calls on Interior agencies to appoint a department coordinator to work with states, federal agencies and conservation organizations to identify and map the migration corridors and winter range of big game animals; those planning to use land in migratory paths must develop site-specific management activities to conserve and restore big game habitats, Harmon reports.

Glossary enables accurate reporting on energy, climate

In her latest Axios column, Amy Harder provides us with a glossary of common terms seen in stories about energy and climate change. "Words matter! Especially sloppy ones in an amped-up media landscape where many don’t look past headlines," she writes. "It’s important to get this stuff right when extreme voices are louder than ever and the president openly doubts mainstream science."

On "clean energy" and "green energy", for example, she writes: "Is it just renewables, like wind, solar and hydropower? Is it energy that doesn’t emit carbon emissions? Is it everything but coal, like this Washington lobbying coalition described it? The term is ambiguous and politically expedient. A better way: Specify the energy type." Read here for more.

Trump infrastructure plan is 25% rural, but states and localities would bear most financial burden for projects

Working on a water line near Torrey, Utah (Photo from National Rural Water Association)

President Trump announced his long-awaited infrastructure plan today, calling for federal investment of $200 billion, $50 billion of it designated for rural areas. But most of the money would have to come from state and local governments. UPDATE, Feb. 14: "Hardly anyone believes that $200 billion federal dollars will produce an additional $1.3 trillion investment from non-federal sources, especially when state and local budgets are being squeezed by rising costs for education and health care," writes William Galston of the Brookings Institution.

"The bulk of the dollars in the Rural Infrastructure Program will be allocated to state governors, giving states the flexibility to prioritize their communities’ needs," the plan says. "The remaining funds will be distributed through rural performance grants to encourage the best use of taxpayer dollars." The plan calls for "reducing regulatory barriers" to infrastructure projects, including faster permitting, with a “one agency, one decision” structure for environmental reviews, which could last no longer than two years.

The plan says it is designed to spur investment of $1.5 billion in infrastructure, the great majority of it from state and local governments and private sources. "Critics say that will lead to higher state and local taxes, and an increased reliance on user fees, such as tolls, water and sewer fees, transit fares and airline ticket taxes," David Schaper reports for NPR. "Half of the funding, $100 billion, will be used as incentives to entice cities, counties and states to raise at least 80 percent of the infrastructure costs themselves. . . .That's a radical departure from the way many projects are funded now. Funding for federal-aid highways, including interstates, is usually allocated in an 80-20 federal-state split."

Schaper reports, "Critics worry that would lead to only projects that could generate revenue, such as toll roads or bridges, getting funded." Revenue-generating projects are usually in urban areas; rural areas tend to rely more on direct government support. The plan also has a subsidy for the Rural Utilities Service, a Department of Agriculture agency that funds broadband, electric, water and wastewater projects, and new mineral-lease revenues to fund projects in national parks and on other public lands infrastructure. It also opens the door to sales of assets by government-owned utilities: the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Southwestern Power Administration, and the Bonneville Power Administration in the Northwest, The Daily Yonder reports.

Schaper adds, "Senior White House officials who briefed reporters over the weekend say the plan is aimed at fixing the current system of funding infrastructure that they say is broken in two ways. The first is that the country has been under-investing in infrastructure, leading a state of growing disrepair. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation a grade of D+ for the condition of transit, highway, bridge, rail, water and other infrastructure, and says the country is in need of an investment of $2 trillion more than is currently budgeted. The second way the White House says the system is broken is in the lengthy federal permitting process, which officials say can take five to 10 years or longer, driving up costs."

The more rural a place, the higher its suicide rate is likely to be; interactive map gives county-by-county data

This is a screenshot of an interactive map, available by clicking here.

Suicide is more common in the U.S. today than at any time in decades, and "It's rural America that is sustaining the largest increases," Mike Maciag reports for Governing magazine. "The aggregate suicide rate for counties outside of metropolitan areas climbed about 14 percent over the five-year period ending in 2016. By comparison, the rate within metro areas also increased, but only by 8 percent." The more rural a place, the higher its suicide rate tends to be; the rate in the most rural places is 18.9 per 100,000; in big cities it's 10.6 per 100,000.

The rate is highest in the West, but "Regional differences are largely a function of demographics," Maciag writes. "White men die at the highest rates, roughly 10 times that of Hispanic women and black women, because they tend to have greater access to firearms. Women, on the other hand, carry out more suicide attempts but generally do so using less lethal means. Gun ownership, which is more prevalent in rural areas, also explains why certain regions have higher suicide rates. Firearms account for about half of all suicide deaths. Research has found that mandating waiting periods, gun locks and other gun control laws are associated with fewer deaths."

Another factor is probably the shortage of behavioral-health care in rural areas; "the vast majority" of people who kill themselves "suffer from a diagnosable mental-health issue,": Maciag notes. "The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is pushing an approach known as 'Zero Suicide' that aims to improve care and outcomes for individuals at risk of suicide in health-care systems. The group is also focusing its efforts on emergency rooms and correctional facilities, two other places where people are at higher risk."

The foundation's Jill Harkavy-Friedman told Maciag, “It’s not the economics itself but the associated stress that leads to physical or mental effects on health,” such as loss of health insurance form unemployment. Maciag notes research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University that has focused on what they call “deaths by despair,” drug overdoses and alcohol-related fatalities as well as suicides. "They found mortality among non-Hispanic whites to be rising for those without college degrees, and improving for more educated whites, blacks and Hispanics," Maciag writes. "The cumulative effects of few labor market opportunities and weakening social structures have largely contributed to worsening mortality for less-educated whites, although the authors note that economics alone don’t fully explain increasing suicide rates."

After decades of addiction and legal action, OxyContin's maker says sales staff won't visit doctors' offices to sell it

Photo by The Associated Press

Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, says it will no longer market its opioid drugs with visits to doctors' offices and it's halving its sales force. The move comes "after years of criticism and mounting lawsuits . . . claiming its sales practices are partly responsible for the opioid epidemic," reports Ben Poston of the Los Angeles Times.

"It's pretty late in the game to have a major impact," Brandeis University researcher Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry's role in the opioid epidemic, told Poston. "The genie is already out of the bottle. Millions of Americans are now opioid-addicted because the campaign that Purdue and other opioid manufacturers used to increase prescribing worked well. And as the prescribing went up, it led to a severe epidemic of opioid addiction." The drug went on sale in 1996; in 2007, in federal court in southwest Virginia, Purdue paid $635 million in fines to end an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Poston writes, "One remaining question is whether other opioid makers will follow suit and cease marketing the drugs to doctors, said Kolodny, executive director and co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing."

"In an attempt to stem the abuse of OxyContin, Purdue spent a decade and several hundred million dollars developing a version of the painkiller that was more difficult to snort, smoke or inject," Poston notes. "Since those 'abuse-deterrent'  pills debuted seven years ago, misuse of OxyContin has fallen and the company has touted them as proof of its efforts to end the opioid epidemic. But a study released in January 2017 found that rather than curtail deaths, the change in OxyContin contributed heavily to a surge in heroin overdoses across the country and that, as a result, there was 'no net reduction in overall overdose deaths'." States with the most OxyContin abuse rates had the largest increases in heroin deaths.

Appalshop arts-and-culture co-op is spotlighted in first installment of new PBS NewsHour series on U.S. artists

Ada Smith of Appalshop (PBS image)

PBS NewsHour began its new "American Creators" series, "taking us to all corners of the country to see artists at work," Friday night with a long profile of Appalshop, the arts-and-culture cooperative based in Whitesburg, Ky., near the Virginia border, in the depressed Central Appalachian coalfield. Jeffrey Brown's eight-and-a-half minute report is hard to reduce to a blog post, but the essential quotes probably came from Ada Smith, who raises money and acts as a spokeswoman: "There’s been a long history of only seeing rural communities and economies as places to take from, and not places to invest in." Brown asks, "And Appalshop says otherwise, huh?" Smith laughs and replies, "Yes. We feel like there’s a lot of wealth and talent and ideas that need to be given a chance."

Herb E. Smith, Ada's father and an Appalshop filmmaker (PBS)

That's a sharp summation of Appalshop, now in its 50th year. Started with a War on Poverty grant as the Appalachian Film Workshop, it soon expanded into other arts and cultural pursuits, started a radio station, a Roadside Theater and film-making workshops for young people, and recently expanded into economic development.

Smith's father, Appalshop filmmaker Herb E. Smith, recalls, his voice breaking, how fewer than 50 of Whitesburg High School's 1970 graduating class remained in Letcher County by that fall "with no hopes of ever returning. Generations of people, thousands and millions of people leave mining areas, and the people who remain miss them. Miss them bad." Appalshop "was a way to be a part of the solution, and to kind of understand the place that we were a part of."

Appalshop has helped build a regional support network to encourage economic development, "with more than a dozen businesses and organizations in the area," Brown reports. When Gwen Johnson's Hemphill Community Center was in danger of closing because of a decline in coal taxes, "with encouragement and support from Appalshop, including $5,000 in seed money, Johnson was able to start a catering company to help pay the bills," and it hires inmates from the local drug court. Johnson said of Appalshop, "They’re friends who kind of stepped up to the plate and began to think outside the box, and sometimes they think bigger than some of us have ever been allowed to think."

Spending bill has help for opioid crisis, health centers, rural broadband, cotton and dairy farms, carbon-capture projects

President Trump signed a two-year budget package today, ending the second government shutdown of 2018, albeit a short one of about eight hours. Congress passed the measure after a delay forced by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who protested that it was fiscally irresponsible. "When Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party," Paul said during the debate. He called the package "a bipartisan looting of the treasury,'" Lisa Mascaro reports for the Los Angeles Times.

USA Today calls the package a "whopping ... basket of goodies," such as $1 billion for dairy and cotton producers, lower prescription-drug costs for seniors, higher premiums for wealthy Medicare patients, and $6 billion for the opioid epidemic. It includes $20 billion for infrastructure initiatives, some of which will go to broadband build-outs, John Eggerton reports for Broadcasting and Cable. The bill also includes almost $90 billion in disaster relief for areas hurt by last year's hurricanes and wildfires, funds community health centers, and extends the Children's Health Insurance Program for an extra four years, beyond the six years recently approved, but "would cut $1.35 billion in funding . . . meant to improve public health and prevention funding for states and municipalities," the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. "The bill continues a special tax rate of 23.8 percent for 2017 for gains from timber sales, a break from the top rate of 35 percent that would have otherwise applied."

Also, the StarTrib reports, "The bill extends a tax credit for 20 percent of an employer’s spending on mine rescue team training costs, up to $10,000" and "allows the immediate deduction of a company’s investment in mine safety equipment." Also on the coal front, "The package included a new tax credit for carbon-capture projects with support from across the ideological spectrum in the Senate," Dino Grandoni reports for The Washington Post. A “diverse group” of senators helped get it through, said Democratic North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, "who has at least three carbon-capture projects in her state." She also "said the fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, representing coal-country Kentucky, had been a co-sponsor on the legislation 'absolutely helped'." 

McConnell had at least two other goodies for Kentucky. The bill will exempt private Berea College from a provision of last year's tax-reform bill that would have taxed its endowment, Eliza Collins and Maureen Groppe report for USA Today. He also inserted an exemption for the state's Southeast Community and Technical College, which was in danger of being disqualified for federal student loans because of a high default rate. McConnell could also be credited with the bill's preservation of tax breaks for owners of racehorses (primarily bred in Kentucky) and racetracks like Kentucky Speedway.

Help scientists learn more about birds with the Great Backyard Bird Count; also includes a photo contest

Do you like bird watching? Are you a science fan? In just 15 minutes you can combine those two interests and help scientists understand more about our world's birds during the Great Backyard Bird Count from February 16-19. Click here for more information.

A yellow-rumped warbler, from the 2017 photo contest.
(Photo by Alicia Brown of Ozark, Ala.)

Launched in 1998 by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, the GBBC was the first online citizen-science project to collect data on wild birds and display the results in almost real time. More than 160,000 people from all over the world take part in the four-day count each year.

Participating is simple: for at least 15 minutes during the count, just tally the numbers and kinds of birds you see, from wherever you happen to be. Create a free online account to enter your count.

And if you like photography, enter the photo contest! Click here for the rules, click here for a gallery of the gorgeous entries from 2017, and click here for a list of prizes.

Federally sponsored lenders will increase rural home loans; county-level map shows under-served areas

Though the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac") have had limited reach into rural America, the government-sponsored mortgage giants have new plans to make it easier for rural homebuyers to get a loan. The two companies own almost half of all U.S. mortgages, but only 12 percent of the rural home loans that were initiated between 2012 and 2015.

Because of this discrepancy, Congress is requiring Fannie and Freddie to increase their business in high-needs rural areas and populations, finance more housing through small banks, and help preserve rental housing. The new requirements will take effect on Jan. 1, 2018. "In many respects, Fannie and Freddie’s current products are not particularly well-suited for many rural markets, as evidenced by their low activity and the congressional mandate itself. New and creative approaches are needed to fully achieve their goals in rural areas," Lance George writes for The Daily Yonder. George is the director of research and information at the Housing Assistance Council, which helps local organizations build homes in rural America and did this map:

"The most effective approach would be for Fannie and Freddie to partner with existing housing providers, nonprofits, and tribes, who already work in these communities," George writes. "These entities have the experience, local trust, and insights to help Fannie and Freddie in these often hard to reach areas. Ultimately, rural America is a big place, with many different housing markets. To make this plan a success, Fannie and Freddie will need to better understand these often-forgotten markets, and commit meaningful efforts and investment."

EPA kills funding for Chesapeake Bay Journal after editorials critical of Trump administration policies

The Environmental Protection Agency pulled funding from a monthly newspaper covering the Chesapeake Bay, possibly because of stories and opinion pieces critical of Trump administration policies. The Clean Water Act requires EPA to keep the public informed about its Bay cleanup project, and it chose to do this by funding the Chesapeake Bay Journal with competitive grants.

Though the Journal's $325,000 annual budget is a "tiny fraction" of the project's $73 million appropriation, in August 2017 EPA emailed editor Karl Blankenship to notify him that the funds would not be renewed "due to a shift in priorities," Jacob Fenston reports for WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C. The grant payment had been awarded in July and was already being processed. The future of the paper is uncertain, since 40 percent of its budget came from the EPA grant.

Nick DiPasquale

The Journal filed an appeal and freedom-of-information requests for pertinent records, but wasn't able to figure out why its funding had been yanked. But in January, the head of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program in Annapolis retired, and started talking to reporters. Nick DiPasquale said that he'd heard rumors the previous summer that EPA political appointees were raising questions about the Journal grant. In an August conference call with EPA political appointee John Konkus, who was in charge of reviewing grants, Konkus said the Journal "shouldn't have weighed in" on political matters, and that "everybody knows the American public doesn't believe the press," Fenston reports. One week later, the grant was canceled.

Rich Kuhlman, who worked on EPA grants for 30 years, said though he's never seen a political appointee making decisions about grants, pulling the Journal's funding may not be illegal. "The Journal isn’t alone in losing its funding. The EPA under Trump has cancelled millions of dollars in competitive grants, some for political reasons, according to the Washington Post. But there is something that sets the Journal apart from other grant recipients," Fenston reports. "As a media institution, it’s protected by the First Amendment against government retaliation for stories it has published." An attorney for legal nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is representing the Bay Journal, says the EPA's actions appear to violate the publication's constitutional rights.

17-year-old from rural southeastern Kentucky has a popular hunting and fishing channel on YouTube

A 17-year-old teen from Knox County, Kentucky, has translated his love for hunting and fishing into a wildly popular video channel. Kendall Gray "started making videos of his outdoor adventures in the summer of 2016 to pass the time, but his YouTube channel has since blossomed into a dedicated online community with nearly 190,000 subscribers and 34.5 million views," Will Wright reports for The Lexington Herald-Leader. "His fans even sport their own hashtag, #GrayGang." And he gets fan mail from people all over the country, mostly from tweens and teens.

It's helping him learn more about business: Gray says he spends up to 35 hours a week shooting and editing his videos as well as managing merchandise. He's sold more than 3,000 pieces of branded merchandise to fans all over the country; his mother Brenda helps him manage the orders. He shows no signs of stopping any time soon. "I’ll take it as far as it wants to go. I’m going to have fun and let other people have fun through my videos," he told Wright, who also works as a journalist for the Ground Truth Project in Central Appalachia

One of Gray's most popular videos, with more than 1.5 million views, shows his efforts to catch a red fox that escaped from one of his snares. Check it out:

Coal-ash pits post threats to groundwater; states say order in Tenn. case to clean up coal ash violates their rights

Toxic waste such as arsenic may be leaking from unlined pits and contaminating groundwater at hundreds of coal-ash storage facilities around the country, says an analysis by environmental law organization Earthjustice. Electric utilities have until March 2 to publish their initial groundwater monitoring results.

"The analysis, an initial review of recently released data from 14 power plants in eight states, comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is weighing whether to revise recently enacted groundwater monitoring rules at coal ash storage facilities," Phil McKenna reports for Inside Climate News. "Nine of the 14 power plants noted 'statistically significant increases"'of toxic substances in groundwater near coal ash containment ponds, Earthjustice found."

James Roewer, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, a trade association representing more than 100 power companies, said drinking water wasn't necessarily polluted by the waste, and said that utilities finding elevated levels of contaminants will conduct extra monitoring as required by a 2015 rule. In May 2017 USWAG petitioned EPA to weaken the monitoring and remediation requirements, saying they were too burdensome, inflexible and often impractical. EPA said it would reconsider some of the provisions.

Meanwhile, 15 states filed an amicus brief arguing that a federal judge's order to excavate a coal-ash pond in Tennessee "'usurps  states' authority to regulate groundwaters,' and will place a financial burden on the Tennessee Valley Authority that could cause rate increases to its customers," Dennis Pillion reports for Alabama.com.

The case centers on an unlined coal ash pond in Gallatin, Tenn. TVA had planned a cover-in-place strategy, but after a citizen lawsuit under the Clean Water Act, a judge ruled that Gallatin's unlined ponds didn't meet the requirements of the CWA, since pollution from the pond was reaching groundwater and the Cumberland River. The TVA argued that it would be time-consuming and expensive to dig out the coal ash and relocate it to a lined landfill as ordered.

EPA boss asks whether global warming is 'necessarily a bad thing.' The best answer seems to be 'Probably.'

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has long questioned the scientific consensus that the climate is changing because of human activity. But in recent months he seems to be trying a different approach, saying that even if climate change is happening, it might not be so bad for humans, Dino Grandoni, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney report for The Washington Post.

Last month Pruitt said in a Reuters interview that "The climate is changing. That's not the debate. The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?" He repeated the line about the ideal surface temperature in 2100 in a Capitol Hill hearing later in January, and last Tuesday said in an interview with KSNV-TV in Las Vegas: "We know humans have most flourished during times of what, warming trends . . . So I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100."

The recent changes have been more rapid than any ever recorded, giving nature less time to adapt, and the Post notes that rising temperatures could boost agricultural yields in some places while causing extreme drought in others. Record-high temperatures and a drought have depleted about two-thirds of the snowpack in California; farmers rely on snowmelt to water their crops, Ellen Knickmeyer and Rich Pedroncelli report for The Associated Press. And droughts increase the likelihood of wildfires, as we saw this past year, Anthony LeRoy Westerling reports for The Conversation.

Lawsuits allege Monsanto forced farmers to buy dicamba-resistant seeds, and that dicamba damaged crops

A North Dakota farm filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Monsanto Co., alleging that farmers are forced to buy its expensive patented dicamba-resistant seed if they don't want their crops to be damaged by dicamba powder drifting from nearby farms.

Forest River Farms' complaint, filed Feb. 1 in Missouri, says "Monsanto’s monopolization and attempted monopolization of the seeds market stymies competition, hurts producers, and harms the public at large," and alleges a class of "all individuals and entities who directly purchased seeds containing Monsanto’s dicamba-resistant trait," Eleanor Tyler reports for Bloomberg Law.

University of Missouri map; click on the image to enlarge it.

Dicamba is a herbicide notoriously prone to vaporizing into a powder and drifting to other fields. A study indicated that it damaged an estimated 3.6 million acres of soybeans in 2017 — about 4 percent of all soybeans planted in the U.S. Several states have banned its sale and use or limited when it can be sprayed. Monsanto responded to widespread complaints by introducing a new version of dicamba it says is less likely to drift. But scientists, who weren't allowed to fully vet the new product before its launch, say it's still too volatile. The new product will be available in 33 states in 2018, and on Feb. 1 Monsanto announced it will provide free mandatory training sessions for farmers on the use of dicamba in 26 of those states.

Also on Feb. 1 a federal judicial panel consolidated nine lawsuits against Monsanto filed in four states, all alleging crop damage from dicamba, into the same eastern Missouri court where the Forest River Farms suit was filed. "Those cases allege that Monsanto marketed dicamba-resistant seeds knowing that would tempt farmers to use dicamba — which has proven destructive to neighboring crops — before Monsanto had regulatory approval to market its low-drift version of the pesticide," Tyler reports.

Agriculture secretary says rural economy is 'fragile'; Tenn. farmer says opioids may be as big a threat as anything

In a hearing on the "State of the Rural Economy" before the House Agriculture Committee yesterday, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue acknowledged that farmers are having a tough time these days. "I wish there were better news but there is a lot of stress and a lot of duress on the farms today," Perdue said. He went on to praise the resiliency of American farmers, but said that "the state of the rural economy is fragile," Andy Eubank reports for Hoosier Ag Today.

"I’m very concerned that if prices continue to fall and we have any kind of an average year or below average year that we could be in some real trouble," said Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the committee's ranking Democrat and former chair. "This is one of the reasons if I had my way I’d like to see a Farm Bill that had an improved safety net going into this situation. But, with no new money, I don’t know how we’re going to do that."

Perdue said part of the stress was because of the "trade environment," and noted that U.S. sorghum prices fell after news surfaced that China is investigating U.S. sorghum exports. The investigation is a warning shot after President Trump imposed high tariffs on solar panel imports, which mostly come from China. The Chinese may also investigate U.S. soybean imports.

While Perdue was talking, the American Farm Bureau Federation was publishing a warning from a farmer about another big issue facing rural America: the opioid epidemic. "Our focus on national regulations and global trade are real issues that need to be addressed, but the future of farming and ranching may be just as dependent on our awareness of curbing the opioid dependency in our grassroots communities where individuals influence national changes," Matt Niswander of Lawrenceburg, Tenn., writes.

"We need rural America’s farmers and ranchers to unite and remove the stigma and veil of shame surrounding opioid use and addiction, and we need additional training for rural healthcare providers to be empowered as strong advocates for non-opioid treatment options," Niswander writes. If we choose to ignore the problem, this epidemic will continue to spread, leaving a devastating impact that will undermine the current state of agriculture in rural America. Rural America’s opioid crisis is here right now."

Lack of healthy grocery choices may be more about demand than supply; healthiness of purchases mapped by county

Common wisdom has held that people buy less healthful foods because they can't afford them or can't find them in nearby groceries, but new research has found that some may simply be less interested in buying healthy foods than others. "According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, those groups include consumers who make less money, have less education, possess lower levels of nutrition knowledge and live in certain geographic areas," Caitlin Dewey reports for The Washington Post.

The four unhealthiest counties were Menominee County, Wisconsin; Turner County, Georgia; McNairy County, Tennessee; and Musselshell County, Montana. All four are rural. The three healthiest three counties were New York County, N.Y. (Manhattan); Pitkin County, Colorado (Aspen); and Iroquois County in east-central Illinois (Watseka, pop. 5,000).Pitkin County has one of the highest median incomes and highest life expectancies in the country.

Washington Post map; click on it for a larger version.

It's already known that high-income families tend to buy healthier foods than the poor, but that can't be explained entirely by cost or availability of healthy food. The paper, which hasn't completed peer review, analyzed 12 years of Nielsen grocery-purchase data from 100,000 households across the U.S. The researchers studied what happened to a household's food purchases when a new grocery opened nearby, or when the household otherwise was no longer in a "food desert" without easy access to fresh produce.

They found that such changes had a limited impact on the foods those households bought, so it may have been more about demand than access. However, the researchers stress that there were factors the study didn't consider, including the time to plan and cook meals, exposure to food marketing, and stress levels. Lead researcher Hunt Allcott, an economist at New York University, "hypothesizes that a region’s dominant cuisine, be that barbecue or avocado toast, informs the meals that people eat as children. That, in turn, has a large effect on their lifelong food preferences," Dewey reports.

Washington state's political divide, long west-east, now more rural-urban, driven by rural resentment of elites

Color depth shows percentage ranges for Trump, Clinton (Wikipedia)

"For decades, pollsters have called it the Cascade Curtain, the apparent voting-habit divide between Western and Eastern Washington. Eastern Washington votes Republican, the idea goes, while the state’s Pacific coast and Puget Sound counties tilt liberal. . . . But it might be time to shove aside that curtain for good, political scientists say. Recent voter polls, election results, and economic data reveal that Washington’s divide now is urban and rural, not east-west," Mike Lewis reports for My Northwest.

Longtime Washington state pollster Stuart Elway "said the shift became abundantly clear in the 2016 elections and more so with every poll he’s done since. Coastal counties that had not voted for a Republican since Herbert Hoover voted for Donald Trump," Lewis writes.

Hillary Clinton carried the state, on the strength of votes from the four counties around Puget Sound, where 54 percent of voters live. Three of those counties are "net donor" counties to the state, meaning they give more in taxes than they get back in spending, but rural voters think it's their counties that are getting the short end of the stick, Elway has found in his polling. "Only 12 percent correctly answer that their county gets more back than they put in," Elway told Lewis. A similar phenomenon was noted in rural Wisconsin focus groups by University of Wisconsin Professor Katherine Cramer for her book, The Politics of Resentment.

W.Va.'s free-college deal would come with a drug test

West Virginia legislators are moving a bill to "create a last-dollar benefit to cover the outstanding costs of tuition and mandatory fees not covered by Pell Grants or other grant aid," Adam Harris reports for The Chronicle of Higher Education. But there's a catch: prospective students would have to pay for, and pass, a drug test to qualify for the scholarship.

That's kicked up some controversy in a state hard-hit by the opioid epidemic. Sponsor Mitch Carmichael, president of the Senate, which passed his Senate Bill 284 unanimously, said "From a state perspective, it helps us say to the world that our work force is drug-free, trained, educated, and ready to go to work." He also says it provides an incentive for people to be drug-free.

Critics say it's unclear how the state will carry out the testing, and whether a student would be excluded for taking legally prescribed painkillers or medication-assisted treatment drugs, which are opioids that prevent an addict from going through withdrawal.

Minnesota holding workshops for law enforcement on farmers' mental-health issues; high suicide rate noted

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture launched a six-week workshop series last week to educate rural law enforcement and the public about mental-health issues affecting farmers. A 2017 University of Minnesota study found that suicide rates among farmers are three to five times higher than all other occupations.

"The 'Down on the Farm' sessions, sponsored by the university's Cooperative Extension Service, will teach people in farming communities to recognize the warning signs of mental and emotional distress and provide information about resources that are available to farmers," Katrina Pross reports for the Minnesota Daily.

Minnesota Sheriffs' Association Deputy Director of Professional Development Randy Willis will present the workshops. He says sheriffs need to known about mental-health issues because they're the primary law enforcement in farming communities, and he hopes they'll learn more tools to help farmers before a mental health problem becomes a crisis.

Farmers in tight-knit communities often don't feel like they can trust health care professionals, and often don't feel like they can take the time out of their busy schedules to go to counseling, according to agriculture-department Director of Mental Health Outreach Ted Matthews: "The planting and harvest system is not easy for them, and the uncertainty that comes with farming can cause a lot of stress and anxiety." Last October the department launched a 24/7 mental-health help line for farmers, which Matthews said has been successful.

Rural broadband will get $2 billion over 10 years, but Trump's infrastructure plan appears unlikely to help

The Federal Communications Commission "has taken the final steps toward finally opening its long-delayed Connect America Fund II, which will disburse $2 billion in federal money over 10 years to support new broadband infrastructure in rural areas throughout the country," Devin Coldewey reports for Tech Crunch.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has made rural broadband expansion a priority, but he's tried to declare an easy win with failed attempts to redefine what counts as broadband: first he tried to lower the threshold for broadband to include service with a download speed of 4 megabytes per second, instead of the current 25 Mbps. Then he tried to conflate smartphone data plans with broadband. Both those proposals would make it look as though much more of rural America receives broadband access than actually does.

President Trump promised more attention to the nation's infrastructure in his State of the Union address, but Blair Levin of The Brookings Institution writes that his infrastructure plan isn't likely to help with rural broadband expansion.

For a comprehensive look at the current state of rural broadband, check out this article by Sharon Strover, an academic who has been out front on the issue for more than a decade.

Trade tensions rise: China probes imports of U.S. sorghum

Less than two weeks after President Trump imposed steep tariffs on solar panels, most of which come from China, and two months after his administration's decision to investigate trade in Chinese aluminum-alloy sheets, China launched a probe into U.S. sorghum imports -- a pointed reminder that U.S. farmers are likely to suffer in a trade war.

"On Sunday, the Ministry of Commerce launched an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation, potentially leading to hefty tariffs on imports of the ingredient used in livestock feed and the fiery Chinese liquor baijiu," Dominique Patton and Michael Martina report for Reuters. "Taking aim at sorghum at a time when the global grain market is in surplus and growers around the world are scrambling to find homes for their products hits at Trump's core political base while avoiding damaging supplies of a product critical at home."

The U.S. imported more than $1 billion worth of sorghum to China last year, making up more than 90 percent of the total sorghum China imports. Most of it comes from Texas and Kansas. A trade war would likely hurt U.S. soybean growers too. Soybeans are the U.S.'s most valuable agricultural export, valued at more than $12 billion last year.

"They believe that if they ratchet up the heat in key red states where there's a large agricultural community that's voted for Donald Trump that it will somehow change the situation," Paul Burke, Asia director at the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told Reuters.

As Trump appointees reconsider new mine-dust rules, researchers find largest cluster of advanced black lung ever

"Epidemiologists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health say they've identified the largest cluster of advanced black lung disease ever reported, a cluster that was first uncovered by NPR 14 months ago," Howard Berkes and Adelina Lancianese report for NPR, saying it reflects "a kind of mining disaster in slow motion" in the Central Appalachian coalfield.

Edward Brown of Harlan, Ky. , 55, is a former coal miner with
complicated black lung. He told NPR, "I can't breathe, you know.
 . . . all I got to look forward to is to get worser and worser."

"In a 'research letter' published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, NIOSH confirms 416 cases of progressive massive fibrosis, or complicated black lung, in three clinics in southwestern Virginia from 2013 to 2017." The clinics also treat miners from Kentucky and West Virginia, for a disease that gradually takes away the ability to breathe. "Lung transplants are the only cure, and they're possible only when miners are healthy enough to qualify," NPR reports.

"We've gone from having nearly eradicated PMF in the mid-1990s to the highest concentration of cases that anyone has ever seen," Scott Laney, a NIOSH epidemiologist on the study, told NPR, which says it has found "that the likely cause of the epidemic is longer work shifts for miners and the mining of thinner coal seams. Massive mining machines must cut rock with coal and the resulting dust contains silica, which is far more toxic than coal dust." Another reason, NPR reports, is "layoffs and retirements brought on by the decline in coal mining. Miners who put off getting checked for black lung earlier began streaming into clinics, especially if they needed the medical and wage replacement benefits provided by black-lung compensation programs."

Norton, Va., lawyer Joe Wolfe said the federal government needs to declare a public-health emergency for the 50,000 miners still working. "New federal regulations that are supposed to limit exposure to dangerous levels of coal and silica dust were fully implemented in 2016, a few months before NPR first reported the PMF epidemic," Berkes and Lancianese report. "The Trump administration recently announced a 'retrospective study' of the new regulations, which has mine safety advocates concerned, especially given the epidemic of the disease caused by mine dust."

Court gives EPA until May 1 to require livestock producers to report waste emissions

In a victory for the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal appeals court ruled that the agency has until May 1 to begin requiring livestock farmers to report animal-waste emissions. The mandate was scheduled to take effect Jan. 22, but the EPA filed a motion on Jan. 19 arguing that farmers weren't ready to meet its requirements.

"The delay follows a court decision in April that the EPA must force farms to report air pollution for animal waste emissions. The decision invalidated a previous policy under then-President George W. Bush that exempted most farms from such reporting requirements," Miranda Green reports for The Hill. Most facilities are required to report emissions to federal, state and local authorities, "but the EPA, under Bush, decided that it could not do anything to reduce or mitigate emissions from animal waste and that requiring reporting would not be useful."

Measuring emissions can be tricky, especially for large-scale feedlots. The EPA promised to start keeping tabs on feedlot emissions 11 years ago, but hasn't been able to do so effectively because it hasn't settled on a consistent method of measuring data. It's difficult to get meaningful data if feedlots aren't measuring their emissions the same way.

Nominations for SPJ's Black Hole Award, which spotlights government secrecy, are due by Friday, Feb. 16

The deadline for nominations for the Black Hole Award is Feb. 16. The award was established by the Society of Professional Journalists to draw attention to the worst violations of the public's right to know about a news story. Nominations can be from local SPJ chapters, SPJ members, other journalists or private citizens. Click here to read more and to see a list of previous winners.

Nominations should meet the following criteria:

1. Violation, in spirit or letter, of any federal or state open-government law. This means either a clear violation of the statute governing access to public records or public meetings, or using an ambiguity or loophole in the law to avoid having to comply with the law. For example: conducting multiple meetings with small groups that do not constitute a quorum, email discussions outside the public view, or charging unreasonable amounts to copy documents.

2. Egregiousness. In order to maintain the effectiveness of the Black Hole Award, it should not be given for just any openness violation. Recipients should know they are trampling on the public’s right, placing personal or political interests ahead of the public good or endangering public welfare. Examples might include an agency or official who attempted to keep information secret to avoid embarrassment or hide misdeeds.

3. Impact. The case should be one that affects the public rather than an individual. The award should not be used to settle vendettas against recalcitrant bureaucrats. Withholding information should hurt the general public rather than an individual.

Nominations should include supporting documentation where possible, including:

• News coverage of the violation.
• Public records chronicling the dispute.
• Legal papers if there was a lawsuit or other legal action involved in the matter.
• Any expert opinion from an attorney, official or open-government expert that the violation occurred.
• Contact information for the parties involved to allow the committee to obtain more information if needed, including from the government official.

Submit nominations by emailing FOI Committee member Mike Farrell at farrell@email.uky.edu or mail to him at the School of Journalism and Media, 144 Grehan Building, University of Kentucky,
Lexington, KY 40506-0042.

Chapter of new book explores the news media's failure to recognize rural America's power in the 2016 election

A book published today by Routledge — The Trump Presidency, Journalism and Democracy — includes a chapter about Donald Trump, rural America, its issues and the national news media’s failure to recognize the power Trump drew from rural voters.

Written by Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog, the chapter digs deep into the issues at play in rural America and how some of them influenced rural Americans to vote for Trump. Rural America has a declining population, a slow rebound from the Great Recession, higher divorce rates, poorer health, and higher mortality rates -- especially from drug overdoses, suicide and alcohol. "Also in rural America, there is a documented resentment of urban elites, including the news media, reflecting a feeling that rural areas aren’t getting a fair shake from government and its trade deals, and that they are looked down upon," Cross writes. And rural voters resent feeling like city folks view them as ignorant racists.

By validating this rural resentment, Trump captured the hearts of rural Americans to an extent that Cross, a columnist and former political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal, says he hadn't seen in 40 years of covering politics. Trump got 39 percent more of the working-class vote than Hillary Clinton, and he did best in the rural areas where people were the worst off. Cross dives into polling data and anecdotal signposts to divine what attracted voters to Trump.

Research showed that Trump voters were more likely motivated by issues of race, ethnicity and immigration than economics. A poll showed that Trump voters were much more likely to agree that white people can't find jobs because employers are hiring people of color; another poll showed that rural voters were worried that they're losing their culture because of immigrants.

But economics was important for some Trump voters: 60 percent of working-class Americans believe that free-trade agreements are mostly harmful because they send jobs overseas and drive down wages. Another poll showed that jobs were not likely to be a big motivator for supporting Trump.

Respect for an authoritarian leader was the biggest indicator of support for Trump. That especially applies to white evangelical Christians, who tend to view the world through an authoritarian religious lens, and white working-class Americans who don't have a college degree. Trump won 81 percent of the votes of white evangelicals.

Trump also picked up a lot of pro-gun votes, as well as a much-needed $30 million from the National Rifle Association. In addition to campaign money, the NRA helped Trump by stoking voters' fears that gun rights were in peril.

Rural outreach and media dominance was another big reason for the vote turnout. Clinton dedicated little time or resources to rural outreach, though she issued a relatively detailed rural policy platform. But Trump won out on the rural media battle with anti-elite talking points and a huge media push on rural-centric RFD-TV in the last weeks before the election. His campaign also made a deal with the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is the nation's largest owner of TV stations: in exchange for more access to Trump and his campaign, Sinclair agreed to shoot and distribute extended interviews with Trump to other stations, often rural, to run without commentary. Sinclair said Clinton declined the same deal. 

National news media were slow to realize the extent of Trump's rural dominance, though it was a major source of navel-gazing on election night and afterward. Chuck Todd of NBC News looked at a map of counties going red and said, "Rural America is basically screaming at us, 'Stop overlooking us!'" Some major media outlets have responded with a variety of efforts to take the pulse of rural America.

Governor frets about coverage of big races; says papers have 'a lot fewer assets' and voters have dubious sources

Tennessee's Bill Haslam (AP photo)

The outgoing Republican governor of Tennessee told the state's newspapers Thursday that he worries the race to succeed him, and other big elections in the Volunteer State this year, "won't be covered in the detail they traditionally have" because "there are a lot fewer assets in your world to work with."

"This is going to be a really important political year," Gov. Bill Haslam said at the Tennessee Press Association convention in Nashville. "This is a real governor’s race. We have a Senate race that’s really important, not just for the state, but the country, right? And a number of congressional seats in play. . . . Not just a free press, but an active and engaged press, matters." He said that is even more important than usual because "You're going to see unheard of outside money pouring into the state."

Andy Sher reports for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, "The governor said that 'as a candidate, you don't always like' the news coverage, but he believes it ultimately makes 'the process of running so much better. And the media is really an incredible part of the process.' Haslam, who noted he reads five print newspapers daily, also voiced concerns about what he hears from people he talks to, particularly those under age 35, about where they're getting their news."

"Haslam said when he asks most people where they get their news, many name dubious sources without editors," Jordan Buie reports for the Nashville Tennesseean. The governor said, "The answers are really discouraging to me." After his term as governor, "Haslam said he would be interested in doing 'something that helps people understand their state and local news in a better way,' and to facilitate an unbiased national conversation. "I think there is something interesting there," he said.