DUNMORE, West Virginia — When President Trump pushed to slash federal funding for public media, he said a key reason was because he thinks PBS and NPR are politically biased. But some of those hardest hit by Congress' decision last week to clawback $1.1 billion in federal funds are small radio operations that provide local news and information to rural communities.
One is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a cooperative of three stations which cover Pocahontas County, West Virginia as well as Bath and Highland counties in Virginia. Allegheny Mountain is not an NPR member station, but it does run NPR's daily newscast, a quick run down of top stories.
Allegheny Mountain's mix of programming includes local news and information as well as gospel, country and blues shows. A recent episode of the Noon Hour Magazine reported on a $5,000 signing bonus to attract new teachers and how the energy demands from data centers could eventually affect this remote region where people sometimes have to drive 60 miles to reach the nearest shopping center.
The show also featured a regular segment on missing pets, in this case a dilute calico with a stripe down its nose.
"I have read a lost and found pet report for an emu that was wandering around the county," recalls Scott Smith, Allegheny Mountain's general manager.
Allegheny Mountain relies on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for up to 65 percent of its annual budget of about half a million dollars. Smith says his stations do have financial reserves, but the hole in their budget could become existential.
"There is only so long that you can continue to exist when you are operating in the red," says Smith, who has a long gray beard that stretches nearly to his belt buckle. "At some point that well runs dry."
Smith hopes to raise more money to try to fill some of the gap, but he worries that eventually he may have to cut staff or even shut a station. Allegheny Mountain is among nearly 70 small radio stations in states such as Alaska, Kentucky, Texas and Mississippi that have relied on the CPB for at least 30 percent of their annual budgets.
Smith says the radio cooperative helps knit together a region where it isn't easy to connect because of the mountains and the spotty access to phone and internet. Much of its coverage area lies inside the Monongahela and George Washington and Jefferson National forests. During a nearly 75-mile drive from an interstate to WVMR, which sits in Dunmore, W. Va., an NPR reporter had no internet connection.
Some people here say they really value the news and community information Allegheny Mountain provides. Jay Garber, mayor of the town of Monterey, Va., says the radio remains the fastest way to let citizens know about everything from water main breaks to road closures.
"It's our only source of local, daily information," says Garber, sitting in his office along Main Street. "We have a newspaper that's printed once a week, so without the radio station, we're kind of in the blind here, locally."
Just down the block from the mayor's office, Jean Hiner is finishing up her french fries at Highs Restaurant, where customers are encouraged to ring a bell on the way out if they like the food. Hiner, 79, who used to raise sheep, says Allegheny Mountain also provides essential information about the people here.
"My husband and I would sit and listen to the radio and then an obituary would come on and we didn't know that that person had died," Hiner recalls. "Then we'd get ready real quick and we'd go to the funeral home for the evening when the family was meeting."
Not everyone loves Allegheny Mountain's coverage. Danny Cardwell. a station coordinator and reporter, recalls that someone became so angry with reporting on contentious county supervisors' meetings back in the mid-2010s that they dumped manure in front of the radio station — not once, but twice.
Smith says he's had unpleasant exchanges with listeners who took issue with Allegheny Mountain simply because it plays NPR's newscast, which accounts for just 40 minutes of the radio stations' daily offerings. One person wrote on Smith's Facebook page that Allegheny Mountain deserved to lose federal funding on that basis alone.
"I literally had an old friend tell me that Allegheny Mountain Radio deserved to die because we played 'liberal propaganda,'" says Smith.
NPR executives deny accusations of political bias and have defended the network's reporting. Smith adds that parts of Central Appalachia are more diverse than some outsiders realize and that many here like NPR. In fact, he says, one listener reached out last week and offered to personally pay for the newscast.
People in the three counties Allegheny Mountain Radio covers voted for President Trump by a margin of nearly three to one last year. Cardwell says in an attempt to punish NPR, Trump is only hurting some of those who have supported him.
"Getting rid of these local stations is throwing away the baby with the bath water," says Cardwell.
Cardwell sees the targeting of public media as part of a broader assault on facts that includes the defunding of universities in an attempt to control the nation's political narrative.
"These stations and all the institutions that produce data and information, those are the institutions under attack," he says.
Allegheny Mountain Radio staff say they don't blame NPR for their loss of federal funding, but they do say they have become a casualty of America's polarized politics.
Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR National Correspondent Frank Langfitt. It was edited by Managing Editors Vickie Walton-James and Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
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