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When President Trump moved to slash federal funding for public media, he said a key reason was because he thinks PBS and NPR are politically biased. But among those hardest hit by the funding cuts Congress approved last week are dozens of community radio stations. Many of those stations are in rural Republican areas and receive money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR's Frank Langfitt drove out to visit one in the mountains of West Virginia.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: To get to WVMR in Pocahontas County, you drive along lush river bottoms and fields filled with hay bales. But for dozens of miles, there's no internet. Turn on the radio, and you hear a lot of this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOOD NEWS")
SHABOOZEY: (Singing) Nobody knows what I'm going through...
LANGFITT: Then, towards the bottom of the dial, there's a different sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HEATHER NIDAY: Good afternoon, and welcome to Noon Hour Magazine right here on Allegheny Mountain Radio. This is Heather.
LANGFITT: Heather is Heather Niday. Like other on-air hosts at WVMR, she just goes by her first name. Allegheny Mountain Radio is a cooperative of three stations. In addition to Pocahontas, they cover Bath and Highland Counties in Virginia. On today's show, there's news about a local teacher shortage.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: Highland County school officials are looking for a few good teachers, so they now are offering a one-time $5,000 sign-on bonus...
LANGFITT: An in-depth series on how the energy demands from data centers could eventually affect this remote region, and this regular feature.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NIDAY: We do want to let you know we have a lost animal out there. She is a dilute calico, and she's got a stripe down her nose.
LANGFITT: Scott Smith is general manager of Allegheny Mountains. He 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. He says the federal cuts will wipe out up to 65% of Allegheny Mountains' annual budget. Smith says they have financial reserves, but the loss of that federal funding could become existential.
SCOTT SMITH: There is only so long that you can continue to exist when you are operating in the red. At some point, that well runs dry. The most horrible thing that I have to think about in my position, do you ponder cutting personnel? Do you ponder shutting down some of our stations?
LANGFITT: That prospect worries Jay Garber. He's the mayor of the town of Monterey, Virginia. Allegheny Mountain Radio covers the town's meetings. Sitting in his office on Main Street, Garber says the radio remains the fastest way to let people around here know about everything from water main breaks to road closures.
JAY GARBER: It's our only source of local daily information. We have a newspaper that's printed once a week, so without the radio station, we're kind of in the blind here locally.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)
LANGFITT: Just down the block here is High's Restaurant, where people are encouraged to ring a bell if they like the food. And Jean Hiner (ph), she's just finished up her french fries. She's 79, and she says Allegheny Mountains provides essential community news.
JEAN HINER: My husband and I, we'd sit and listen to the radio, and then there - an obituary would come on, and we didn't know that that person had died. And then we'd get ready real quick and we'd go to the funeral home for the evening when the family was meeting.
LANGFITT: Allegheny Mountain Radio is not a part of the NPR network. It only plays the NPR newscast, a quick rundown of top stories. Danny Cardwell is a station coordinator and reporter. He says, in an attempt to punish NPR, Trump is hurting some of the communities that voted for him.
DANNY CARDWELL: I don't think people understand what's at stake. I think that the idea of getting rid of these local stations is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
LANGFITT: Cardwell sees the targeting of public media as part of a broader assault that includes the defending of universities in an attempt to control the nation's political narrative.
CARDWELL: These stations and all the institutions that produce data and information, those are the institutions that are under attack.
LANGFITT: NPR executives deny accusations of political bias and have defended the network's reporting. And Allegheny Mountain Radio staff say they don't blame NPR for their loss of funding, but they do say they've become a casualty of America's polarized politics.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Dunmore, West Virginia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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