National Public Radio media reporter David Folkenflik performed another advertisement for "public broadcasting" instead of news reporting. He checked in Harrisburg, South Dakota on Friday from a football tailgate, where he uncovered Trump voters who supported taxpayer funded public broadcasting of NPR and PBS.
South Dakota is a telling choice, one of those sparsely populated red states (like Alaska) where the people supposedly rely on NPR for the farm report or emergency weather warnings. It's also the home state of Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
The radio version that aired Tuesday was headlined “‘There's been a lot of tears': Local public media stations grapple with federal cuts.” A local public television executive Folkenflik talked to referred to South Dakota as a “news desert.” They're so insulting, like there are no privately owned TV stations or newspapers in the whole state.
Folkenflik prodded the parents he met tailgating to talk about “what they rely on for news.”
"Mainly just a Fox guy," says Aaron Zahn, the truck's owner, who builds grain elevators. He likes Gutfeld! — the conservative late-night comedy show on Fox News.
At a Harrisburg High School football tailgate, when asked where he gets his news, Aaron Zahn shares that he mostly watches Fox.
Dawn Bures, whose son, Harrison, plays wide receiver for the Tigers, says she follows "citizen journalists on the internet," citing social media influencer Jessica Reed Kraus' House Inhabit.
When it comes to public media, both say they support President Trump's push to take back all federal funds.
Folkenflik scoured the scene for supporters of his employers in public media.
That largely reflects the sentiments of most — though not all — of a dozen people who came to the football stadium to see the Tigers rout the Yankton Bucks. A sports health executive said he relies on friends to text him about news developments; a retired accountant said he watches Fox News yet loves PBS nature shows; a reading intervention teacher said she appreciates the educational shows and apps that public media provides.
Folkenflik buried the liberal bias argument in the middle of a paragraph showing Republican support for local stations.
Much of the wrath from Trump and the Republican Party was directed at PBS and NPR, not local stations, for what conservatives contend is liberal bias — a charge the networks reject. Some Republican lawmakers even took pains to praise offerings from their local stations.
Under the subhead “Trump supporters see benefits in local public media,” he wrote:
South Dakota is Trump country. And yet, like in many other rural regions, people here find that public media serves a need as other local news outlets are increasingly hard to come by.
"Trump is vindictive, as we all know. I'm with the guy," Nat Van Gorkum, a plumbing-supplies manager, told me outside a take-and-bake pizza shop in Sioux Falls. "I think the reason he's doing it is you guys have gone a hell of a long ways to the left in the last five or 10 years."
Even so, Van Gorkum says, he opposes cutting money for public broadcasting. "I grew up watching Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, stuff like that. That's a good thing," Van Gorkum says.
Nice memories, but no longer relevant: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is long gone, and Sesame Street presently has a tangled relationship with PBS. And edutainment is hardly thin on the ground these days.
Folkenflik did find a crepe-maker who loves his public radio.
[Chef Michael Haskett] grew up in Sioux Falls, went to culinary school in New York's Hudson Valley and became a public radio junkie. He says he relies on NPR and South Dakota Public Broadcasting to tell him what's happening around the area, the nation and the world.
"So, yeah, I'm very upset that we're defunding a very important news source, a very trustworthy news source, because it doesn't fit into one political party's agenda," Haskett says. He says he gives money to South Dakota Public Broadcasting and to Minnesota Public Radio, which operates a small station in Sioux Falls.
Folkenflik doesn't explain that liberal Chef Haskett has also appeared on South Dakota Public Broadcasting, displaying his Pan Fried Walleye recipe.
