Rural areas are more dependent on public radio, TV

In the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney said he would cut federal funding for public broadcasting. Public television and radio outlets, including PBS and National Public Radio, received just $445 million of the 2012 budget, about .014 percent. In The Washington Post, Brad Plumer reflected on the importance of public broadcasting, and argued that if the budget is cut, rural areas would suffer the most.

"The usual arguments in favor of public broadcasting focus on the facts that a) public television and radio are highly educational and b) that this government spending mainly benefits rural areas with few other media options," Plumer writes. The government doesn't actually give money to PBS or NPR, he notes; it gives it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which parcels out the money based on a formula. A lot of it goes to TV programming, the rest goes to 581 local TV and radio stations across the U.S.

PBS would lose just 15 percent of its budget, and NPR just 2 percent if Congress eliminated the public broadcasting budget. But local stations in many rural areas might be forced to close or drastically cut back their programming because more than 50 percent of their funding comes from the government. Plumer says that would be bad for children in rural areas who have only three options for educational programming: Nick Jr., Disney Jr. and PBS. "For families that can't afford cable, PBS is the only option," Plumer wrote. "The big worry is that an end to government funding would leave pockets of the country without public radio and TV, replaced by commercial stations that are less affordable, more saturated with advertising, and less educational." (Read more)

Rural residents depend on papers for local news, but urbanites are more interested in local topics

Metropolitan, suburban, smaller town or rural, all types of places are big consumers of news -- be it local, national or international. But how and where we get that news and how much we "participate" in it differs between community types. And that may be more of a function of the digital and social media available to us than our desire to weigh in on the topics. Or so a recent study of local news and community types strongly indicates.

A just-released national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that rural residents did indeed still rely on newspapers for most of their local news. Researchers speculated that is because most rural areas get little coverage from other media, and many "micropolitan" towns of fewer than 50,000 people have no television station.

However, they noted that "the choices about information acquisition are not necessarily the same in all communities. For instance, it might be the case in rural areas that the local newspaper and broadcast outlets are not online or have a very limited online presence and that is a determinant in whether residents get local information online or not."

And, perhaps surprisingly, researchers found that those who live in rural communities are "less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also are less likely . . . to say it is easier now to keep up with local information."

Interestingly, rural people were more likely than most to say they are willing to pay for local news content through a paid subscription to a local paper; 37 percent said so, a larger share than any but suburbanites, at 40 percent.

The study, co-authored by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also reported these findings:

• Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.
• The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities where they email local stories to others, post material on sites, comment, post or e-report.
• Suburbanites are most likely to use radio as a news source -- researchers postulated this might be a consequence of longer commutes. They are the most likely of the four distinct community types to use the Internet for information about local restaurants, businesses and jobs.

To read the full report, go here.

Water-conservation PSAs do a drip-drip-drip on Internet as drought recovery slowly begins

This summer's massive drought has infiltrated the national consciousness and now resonates within our video culture. YouTube has become inundated with public-service announcements about water conservation, Felicity Barringer of The New York Times reports. Making a video seems to be "the school project du jour," she writes, but others stand out.

"Often, contributions to the art form show someone cavalierly overusing water in the sink or shower and are supplemented by statistics about the amount of water wasted every year. One variant features water wardens — like the 'Saturday Night Live' comedians Horatio Sanz and Rachel Dratch — dropping in on the bathrooms and kitchens of unsuspecting water spendthrifts," Barringer reports. There is one featuring toddlers from France, and another from Malaysia. Some use music; "Sesame Street" characters assist on others.

This following comes from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro:



Here's another from Kennesaw State University in Georgia:

Scientists' survey of last year concludes that Fox, Wall Street Journal misled on climate change

A new study contends that Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have greatly misled their audiences about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that 93 percent of Fox broadcasts and "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" TV programs about climate change from February through July, and 81 percent of Journal editorial pages from August 2011 through July 2012, were misleading.

The survey defined inaccurate information about climate change as citations that "questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due to human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science."  Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones writes, "The climate change debate in America is still mired in bickering over whether the problem even exists or not." (Read more)

Obama making rural radio pitch in Ohio, Pa. areas

President Obama did poorly among rural voters in 2008, but he is still chasing their votes, because they could make a difference in some big swing states in this year's election. The latest evidence of that is a 60-second radio ad that his campaign started Friday on stations serving rural areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The campaign is spending at least $35,000 in markets such as Pittsburgh; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Youngstown, Ohio; and Huntington, Charleston and Parkersburg, W. Va.," Alexander Burns of Politico reported. In a later post, he writes that Obama is "making the case that his policies help people in smaller towns sustain their way of life" and notes, "Rural radio is a fairly low-cost way to try and peel away voters who may be less drawn to Mitt Romney than to a generic Republican candidate."

In the ad, which is part of Burns's latest post, Obama says he wants rural young people to be able to say, "We can succeed here just like we can in the big city." He starts the ad by noting, "My grandparents came from the Midwest." His maternal grandparents were from Kansas.

Rumor EPA was using drones for surveillance of pollution from farms, fed by Fox, is shot down

"The Environmental Protection Agency isn't using drone aircraft -- in the Midwest or anywhere else," David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reports, in an effort to quash rumors that the agency was using the same drones used to kill terrorists to spy on Midwestern farmers. The rumor filled airwaves this month, and Fahrenthold writes this reveals "something hard to capture in American politics: the vibrant, almost viral, life cycle of a falsehood."

The lie was born out of true reports about EPA inspectors flying in small planes, something they've done for more than 10 years, looking for clean-water violations. The flights are legal, says the EPA, under a 1986 Supreme Court decision, and only cost about $1,000 to $2,500 instead of the $10,000 it costs to do the same inspections on the ground.

Nebraska ranchers have recently become concerned about the effects of the flights, calling them an invasion of privacy. A coalition of Nebraska's congressional delegation wrote a letter to the EPA asking about the planes and the flights. They never mentioned drones, but Fahrenthold reports that soon after the letter was sent, someone did start mentioning drones and the rumor quickly got out of hand. "In the days since, the truth has begun, slowly, to rouse itself and stagger after the lie," Fahrenthold reports. (Read more)

The rumor was fed by Megan Kelly of the Fox News Channel, which issued a "clarification" after Farenthold's story.