Kirk Siegler
As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.
His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.
Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.
Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.
Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.
Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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A settlement has been announced in a landmark case that prohibits cities from ticketing homeless people for camping in public places — if there aren't adequate shelter beds available.
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Five months after most of the farming town of Malden, Wash., was destroyed, President Biden has approved a stalled federal aid package. -
Most of the oil and gas drilled in Wyoming comes from federal land and communities there are bracing for job losses and school funding cuts in the wake of a Biden administration pause on new leasing. -
In many rural, and more conservative corners of the country, reaction to the historic nomination of Joe Biden and the nation's first woman and minority vice president was more muted.
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President Biden has been sworn in, but some people in conservative parts of the U.S. say they still believe the false notion that former President Donald Trump is the winner of the 2020 election.
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Historians say the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol flowed in part from the refusal by some elected officials to openly condemn a particular strain of far-right extremism going back to the 1990s.
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Violent acts of insurrection like the U.S. Capitol mob have been incubating in the western U.S. for years, where self-described "patriots" have led armed uprisings, often with few legal consequences. -
Violent acts such as the riot on Capitol Hill have been incubating in the Western U.S. for years. Some have stormed federal buildings and threatened agents, with little legal consequences.
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Some rural areas, where health care is usually harder to get, appear to be leading the nation in delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine. But health leaders are cautioning there are caveats. -
In some parts of the U.S., the biggest challenge surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine isn't distribution, but convincing people to get it, as anti-science groups are spreading misinformation.
