The Growing Gap Between Urban and Rural Maine and How to Bridge the Divide
A presidential visit to any remote corner of the United States is, historically, an occasion for celebration. To witness the leader of the free world roll through the streets of small town, USA is rare, and it has the potential to unite citizens behind the excitement of a high-profile visit.
When Donald Trump landed in Guilford, Maine in June of 2020, a host of red, white, and blue clad Mainers feverishly greeted him. They lined route 15 in downtown Guilford hours before Marine One landed on the front lawn of the local elementary school, and they spread out on truck tailgates and lawn chairs, sharing coolers of bottled water in the warm early summer sunlight.
The streets buzzed with distinct sounds of “four more years” and “Make America Great Again” to match the red ball caps and Trump 2020 signage that flooded Main Street. The scene seemed to have been transplanted from a 2016 campaign rally for the Republican candidate, eschewing the norms of a global pandemic and the would-be bipartisan celebration of a production bump at the local Puritan Medical Products facility. Guilford had just been chosen to begin manufacturing the medical swabs needed in the fight coronavirus and added 300 jobs to its local economy in the process.
Amidst the novelty of the occasion, a deeply divided public became the story of the day, both in the events on the streets of the town of 1500 residents and in the ensuing news coverage. A small group of protesters gathered on the corner of Main Street where President Trump’s motorcade would turn before landing at the Puritan plant. Their qualms with the president and his administration ranged from coronavirus response and racial equality to his campaign for a second term as president.
That blue speck in the wave of red represented a state divided along its congressional district border, raising its partisan head along rural and urban lines for the rest of the country to see. Mainers arrived in accordance with protests and rallies across the country, ready to proclaim their undying support or deep resentment of a polarizing figure.
A Conglomeration of Problems
2019 US Census data makes clear the important economic differences between the two Maines. Using congressional district lines as a de-facto border, the figures identify wide disparities in household income, with families earning $67,392 on average in CD 1 compared to $51,202 in CD 2. Poverty rates also fall heavier in CD 2 at 13.0 percent compared to 8.9 percent in CD 1. 40.5 percent of CD 1 residents over the age of 25 have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, while only 25.4% of CD 2 residents have done so, and the average value of a home in CD 2 is more than $100,000 less than in CD 1.
The chasm doesn’t end with economic data. The entire state was once a stronghold for independent politics, but President Trump has generated a host of support in the rural second district, while the southern coast stands as a progressive bastion. In 2016 and 2020, Maine split its four electoral votes. In both years, two went to the democratic candidate to represent the popular vote in the state. The other two were split between District 1’s vote for the democrat and District 2’s support for Trump.
The figure below represents the state shifting away from democratic roots during the Obama administration and toward a state divided: firebrand conservatives in the form of Governor Paul LePage and President Donald Trump latched onto the second district and have yet to relinquish it. Trump won the second district in 2020 with 52.4% of the votes compared to Biden’s 44.7%. It wasn’t enough to offset Biden’s landslide victory in the southern district, but the line remains.
There’s another divide that hasn’t received as much attention, and that’s the one between media access and coverage in the two Maines. Lesser-known statistics about the two Maines include the 19% decrease in total newspapers between 2004 and 2019, and the 39% drop in newspaper circulation over the same time, according to The University of North Carolina’s study on expanding news deserts. While Maine’s seven daily newspapers from 2004 all remain in circulation, weekly newspapers have dropped from 63 to 51.
The distribution of defunct weeklies occurs across the state, with papers from the Fort Fairfield Review to the York County Coast Star having shuttered their offices. It’s within these growing news voids that partisan media has spread.
In 2017, Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King spoke with NBC’s Meet The Press. Collins, a Republican who’s widely heralded as the most bi-partisan member of the Senate, said, “More and more people are living with people who have the same views that they have. They are accessing news outlets that reinforce what they already think. We are seeing a growing intolerance on campuses for alternative viewpoints. All of that combines to produce divisions in our country.”
The echo chamber Collins described is perhaps part of the ugly truth about the digital media age. Algorithms designed by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media platforms and news aggregates are intended to generate clicks, likes, views and shares at a higher rate — they’re not designed to provide balanced, fact-checked news content.
It’s a problem that’s been identified by those who study mass media, though it’s still unclear how to move forward. A team of Bowdoin College researchers launched a news-sharing app called Media Trades in January of 2020. According to the Media Trades home page, the app is a “simple, free, and non-profit tool that allows people from the left and right sides of the political spectrum to trade media content.”
Dan Stone, an economist and one of the project’s collaborators, cited the need to address the echo chamber problem and expose people to ideas that they might not encounter within their own curated media channels.
The app, which randomly links users who have self-identified on different sides of the political spectrum, facilitates the sharing of political news content with the intent of bridging political and media divides. Conservatives must read and respond to an article shared by a Liberal, and in turn they’ll have a chance to share content that reflects their own side of an issue.
Bowdoin’s project provides a model for civic discourse in the digital age, but can it ever be far-reaching enough to make a dent in the polarizing world of social media?
Facebook users who browsed their news feeds during the 2016 and 2020 news cycles have likely seen articles that look a lot like news but are actually a form of sponsored content.
Articles from The Maine Wire (produced by the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center) and Maine Beacon (from the openly progressive Maine People’s Alliance) look a lot like traditional media websites. These sites have openly biased agendas, but the share-ability of online media, combined with Facebook’s tendency to show users content that confirms their biases, allows these publications to compete, and sometimes out-compete, traditional news sources.
A May 2018 article from The Maine Monitor references a social media engagement report from the Beacon that suggests in one week in April 2018, “Beacon stories were shared more than 9,600 times. By comparison, politics and opinion pieces in the Portland Press Herald were shared 5,128 times, and the Bangor Daily News State and Capitol blog had 268 shares.”
Ironically, Collins’ high profile senate race against Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon was the impetus for party-sponsored media spread beyond The Maine Wire and Maine Beacon. An October article from the New York Times identified the digital publication Maine Business Daily as one branch of a network of news-like pages sponsored by conservative operatives to spread content that would damage Democratic candidates in 2020 election cycle.
Faux news websites aren’t just a Republican misinformation tactic. Sun Journal of Lewiston detailed efforts made by the fake news publication Courier to elect Maine 2nd District Congressman Jared Golden, a Democratic incumbent. Golden disavowed Courier’s articles, but the Journal reported that the site spent “at least 50k” in a campaign for Golden’s reelection.
To view the rise of party-sponsored fake news as a distinctly democratic or republican tactic would be a mistake on the part of Maine news consumers. An adequate response to restore faith in a broken media system involves efforts by multiple players.
A Multi-pronged Solution to a Multi-pronged Problem
The forces creating the chasm between rural and urban Maine are dynamic. The various influences that spread partisanship and polarized values work together simultaneously to create a problem that requires a layered solution. In terms of the media divide in Maine, we know that waning local news access, digital echo chambers, partisan “news” pages, and low media trust make up a formidable challenge to a healthy democracy. Addressing the current scenario will involve intentional steps taken by local media outlets, media users, and media literacy teachers, as well as improved web infrastructure in rural areas. Here’s what works in other places.
Engagement
In an online seminar with journalism students from the University of Oregon, staff writer Carl Segerstrom of High Country News gave this advice: rural journalists need to write stories for their communities, not about them. While HCN serves the northwestern United States, Segerstrom’s approach to country reporting has implications for journalists in Maine.
When the public lacks trust in their local media outlets, they look to alternative sources to fill the void. As previously established, this is problematic because local news is often the best opportunity to provide citizens with factual, relevant information about their immediate lives. Creating a robust system of public engagement is one way that local news can begin to mend the public’s broken trust.
At the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, researchers Todd Milbourn and Lisa Heyamoto uncovered civic engagement as a pillar of rebuilding media trust in their year-long study, The 32 Percent Project. This research, along with other national and local media trust studies, suggest that providing the public with transparency about the reporting process and opening the conversation to gather community feedback are two important methods that local newsrooms can use to engage with readers. When the public is invited to weigh in on what matters to them, journalists are better able to write stories that reflect their communities.
Crowdsourcing ideas for local news stories helps underserved populations to feel like their voices are being heard. This is critical in rural areas, where the growing absence of small-town newspapers leaves little room for rural communities to see themselves in the news.
One solution is GroundSource, a media platform that focuses on engagement. News outlets like Peoria Journal Star, Toledo Blade, the Seattle Times, and the Poughkeepsie Journal employed the texting platform to open two-way texting conversations with individuals and large groups about the stories that matter to them. Examples include connecting with specific community groups, recruiting a cross section of local readers, spreading the word about educational events, and following up after a story is published to gauge audience engagement and reaction.
A platform like GroundSource would give Maine communities an opportunity to take ownership of their news. At a time when rural areas feel misrepresented by large urban news outlets and parachuting reporters, the large swaths of Maine citizens who are underserved can begin to repair their trust when their local papers make direct connections.
Improved Media Literacy
Transparency in the reporting process is one of the best ways to engender public media trust. There may be no better avenue for transparency than teaching people what media creation looks like and how to do it themselves.
Rural populations face certain shared challenges, but rural Maine has its own unique set of circumstances, and giving voice to Maine youth through media literacy practices should be a priority for news rooms and organizations that seek to rebuild trust and elevate local voices.
The Appalachian Media Institute is a model to follow. AMI has been teaching media literacy in central Appalachia for 30 years, empowering rural youth by teaching media skills that help this demographic to better voice their unique position in the world.
Among the most important philosophical tenets of this program is the idea that media literacy in low-population, low-income areas needs to be situated within that uniquely rural context. According to their website, “AMI helps young people explore how media production skills can be used to ask, and begin to answer, critical questions about themselves and their communities.” In central Appalachia, these questions look like high unemployment rates, drug abuse, or a dying coal production industry. Students at AMI workshops learn skills like documentary video production to tell place-based stories, which helps to reaffirm that their own unique experiences in their small corner of the world are valid and worth being heard.
In Maine, similar media workshops could provide rural youth with the skills to examine important topics like the declining paper mill industry, an aging (and shrinking) population, or the problems presented by poverty in a cold Maine winter. They could even tell stories about the rural/urban divide in Maine itself.
Fortunately, a few practices similar to this are already in place. Programs like Our Maine: The Way Life Is and The Sound of Maine, offered through the University of Maine and The Maine Writing Project, leverage digital technologies to give students a space to tell their own stories about the places they call home. These successful practices should be adapted to teach students how to write and report about Maine using journalistic techniques as well. Doing so demystifies the process reporters use to write stories, and engenders trust in the concept that journalists work hard to portray their subjects fairly and accurately.
University Level Involvement
Serving communities and assisting citizens in the democratic process have long been entrenched in journalistic value systems. However, a shift toward urban-centered political reporting often leaves the rural public wondering exactly how events in Washington (or Augusta) impact their day-to-day lives. The chasm between country life and the metropolitan political scene in Maine and elsewhere is exacerbated by the demise of local papers. When large dailies like the Bangor Daily News and Portland Press Herald are forced to cut staff and resources in the face of funding challenges, it’s often those people in Maine’s second congressional district that feel the loss.
The space left behind must be filled with reporting that targets these media deserts. One example to look to is the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. The Institute provides a conduit through which to interpret national and state political issues through a rural lens, and in turn “helps non-metropolitan journalists define the public agenda for their communities and grasp the local impact of broader issues.” In addition to holding seminars for non-metropolitan journalists and conducting research on rural communication, The Rural Blog is one method the Institute uses to speak directly to the non-urban public. “A digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism about rural America,” The Rural Blog highlights issues that directly affect those living far from the country’s capitols.
The University of Maine at Presque Isle partners with this project from University of Kentucky, which is positive news for those living in Aroostook County. The opportunity remains for the rest of the University of Maine system, which holds representation across the state, to get on board. Even better, University of Maine schools could partner together to produce digital and print news content that addresses rural Mainers and fills the gaps left by shrinking publications in Portland, Lewiston-Auburn, and Bangor.
Empathy
Despite the apparently divided public on the streets of Guilford on that June day of the President’s visit, reason for hope remains. Nobody was hurt or arrested, and the violence and police/protestor clashes that had characterized rallies around the country never reared their head. The mood of the day was decidedly understated in typical Maine fashion. It was an historic afternoon, but nobody was going to get fired up enough to harass the neighbors and acquaintances they would likely see at the gas station or grocery store the next day. In this sense, traditional Maine values won the day. People take care of people in the often harsh, rural northeast. National politics made their appearance, but the friendly ethos of the Pine Tree State wouldn’t be trampled.
The overgeneralization and mischaracterization of rural Maine life is perhaps the most critical factor in the disenfranchisement felt in sparsely populated areas of the state. With limited resources to travel and speak with the rural public, the task of amplifying these voices falls on individual reporters in many ways. We can start by rebuilding connections with journalists who live in these areas. The public should push Maine’s large newspaper editors to commission local reporters for stories whenever possible.
We also need to work hard to shed our preconceived notions about rural Maine. Stories that accentuate the sharp divide in election results and highlight differing value systems between northern and southern Maine fail to account for the diversity and nuance of the state’s population. Reporters can do better in emphasizing the shared experience of Mainers, and in doing so, building a stronger sense of statewide identity.
The misrepresentation of rural Maine as uneducated, poor, and conservative paints its vibrant communities with too broad a brush. Likewise, portraying Portland residents as radically progressive elitists transplanted from Massachusetts does nothing to recognize the unique nature of the Maine way of life. At our best, we Mainers are a fiercely independent, industrious, freethinking people who collectively make up a state with its own brand of politics and culture. The dynamic circumstances that have led to our divide along national political lines present a challenge, but not one that can’t be overcome by emphasizing our shared experiences and using creative, modern media strategies.
