News Desert Nation: Inside the Quiet Coup on Local News
By the time dawn seeps over Shreveport, Louisiana, Jeff Ferrell has already lit the studio lights at KDAQ. He is Red River Radio’s only full-time journalist, serving as the station’s host, reporter, engineer and emergency-alert operator for listeners in northwest Louisiana, southern Arkansas, eastern Texas and the southeasternmost corner of Oklahoma.
“There are parishes with nothing, not even a weekly paper,” he told CBS during a recent interview.
Ferrell, who spends 15-hour a day on air, is one of dozens of lone wolf station operators whose days are about to stretch further.
On July 18, 2025, Congress muscled through President Trump’s rescissions package, stripping roughly $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and ordering it to stop funding NPR and PBS. The vote squeaked through the Senate 51-48 and the House 216-213, despite warnings that more than 1,500 local stations—60 percent in Trump-won states—could go dark.
Jeff Ferrell of Red River Radio | Image courtesy of CBS News
For city dwellers swimming in push alerts, the move could sound like an unfortunate budgetary scuffle. For the rural interior, it is an existential threat. Public broadcasters are the last daily newsrooms in two-thirds of U.S. counties now classified as “news deserts,” places with no daily paper and often no weekly either. If those transmitters fall silent, whole regions will be cast into an information void already yawning wider each year.
Anatomy of a news Desert
A news desert is a community, often an entire county or cluster of counties, where residents have little or no access to original, professionally produced local news.
The term “news desert” barely existed 20 years ago. Then classified ads fled to Craigslist, display ads to Facebook and printing presses to the scrap heap. Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 60% of newsroom jobs due to advertising declines and digital disruption, with two-thirds of U.S. counties (more than 2,000), now holding a below-average number of local journalists, according to the Local Journalist Index 2025 from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, a local journalism nonprofit.
Overall, rural Americans are far more likely to have no professional local journalism, with many lower-income, less-educated communities have been especially hard hit.
An analysis by Northwestern University’s Medill School found that rural counties dominate the map of news deserts. For example, in “Aging Farmlands” across the Plains states, 94% of counties have no daily paper. In the “Evangelical Hubs” of the South and Midwest–largely white, religious, working-class communities–85% of counties lack a daily news outlet.
By contrast, urban and suburban areas with higher incomes tend to sustain multiple news sources and rarely become news deserts.
In 204 counties—6 percent of the country—there is no newspaper at all. Not a shopper, not a start-up site, nothing. Public radio or a low-power PBS repeater has often been the lone professional news presence, mandated by the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to serve “every citizen.” That promise is now broken.
Isolation and the Misinformation Feedback Loop
“Information abhors a vacuum,” warns the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life. News deserts leave communities isolated–culturally, civically and epistemically–making them fertile ground for misinformation and polarized thinking.
Cut off from fresh information, many rural communities turn inward, often holding onto traditions or nostalgia unchallenged by outside perspectives. Public-media advocates note that rural Americans already feel unseen by mainstream media; only 41% of rural residents say local media covers their community well (versus 62% in cities). As local news wanes, this sense of isolation deepens.
What Rushes In When Reporters Rush Out
Sensationalized content fills the vacuum: Across the country, dozens of websites disguised as local news have popped up to push fraudulent stories, conspiracies and rumors in areas starved of real news. In other cases, Facebook groups and neighborhood apps become de facto news sources, but these social media spaces are notoriously awash in misinformation.
Fact-checking collapses: A local newspaper traditionally acts as a watchdog – correcting gossip, debunking false claims and holding officials accountable. When that watchdog is gone, false narratives face little resistance. A UNC study emphasizes that local sources are needed to “counteract the spread of misinformation”; without them, lies can spread locally with no correction.
Civic engagement declines: When local newspapers vanish, communities also experience declines in local civic engagement and voter turnout. One study noted that in cities like Denver and Seattle, the closure of a newspaper was followed by a 30% drop in civic participation within a year.
History also shows that when communities lack diverse news voices, they can more easily maintain “old ways of thinking” and resist social change. A stark example comes from the civil rights era: in the mid-20th century American South, most small towns had at least one local paper, but those papers were usually white-owned and unabashedly cheerleaders for white supremacy.
From Reconstruction through the 1960s, many local Southern newspapers printed racist propaganda, justified lynchings and demonized civil rights activists. Their one-sided, segregationist coverage had fatal consequences, such as inciting violence and stiffening white resistance to integration. There was little alternative media in these isolated towns; Black newspapers existed mainly in larger cities, and national TV was only just emerging.
Thus, entire counties were information silos where Jim Crow-era beliefs went unchallenged by local press. It took national news exposure, images of brutality beamed on TV, federal intervention and outside journalists to finally pierce these bubbles. This historical case illustrates how a local “news vacuum” (or a monopoly of biased news) can freeze communities in outdated or extremist ideologies. People simply did not hear narratives that challenged the status quo, so old thinking persisted far longer.
What Would It Take to Reverse the Slide?
State-level journalism funds: For example, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a landmark public-funding initiative that promotes informed communities and strengthens local journalism will receive $2.5 million in state funds this upcoming year. We hope to see more state funded initiatives follow suit.
Nonprofit news and media startups: Outlets like the Texas Tribune and Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting prove reader-member models can thrive. Outlets like HYVEMIND provide critical analysis and critique.
Refund CPB: The simplest fix is to restore the appropriation in the next budget cycle and firewall it from political retaliation. Until then readers and viewers should plan to donate to their local stations. See here for more information on donating to your local PBS station. See here to donate to your local NPR station.
Silence Is a Policy Choice
America’s founding promise hinged on an informed public where citizens could see their own towns reflected in print and hold power to account. That architecture is splintering, plank by plank, in the country’s quietest ZIP codes. With one vote, lawmakers have chosen to accelerate the rot, exchanging a negligible budget saving for a cascading loss of civic infrastructure.
The cost will not appear on the federal ledger. It will surface instead in places like the San Luis Valley when a wildfire warning never reaches a mobile home park, or in the Mississippi Delta when conspiracy sites replace county-commission minutes. It will echo in school-board meetings conducted before half-empty bleachers because no reporter bothered to post the agenda. The nation may still hum with information, but the frequencies that bind neighbor to neighbor will fall silent.
Reversing course is neither abstract nor partisan; it is mechanical. Reinstate CPB funding. Seed state-level press collaboratives. Support nonprofit news agencies. None of these remedies require a moonshot, only the recognition that democracy cannot run on empty signals. Rural America deserves better than curated ignorance. So does the republic that depends on its vote.
