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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Despite alarming rises in COVID-19 cases and deaths in rural America, some schools are under pressure to stay open for in-person learning while resisting requiring masks and other measures. -
A portion of the first coronavirus vaccines have been designated to go to Indian Country, but some tribes are skeptical about the federal government's ability to deliver and distribute the vaccines. -
President Trump signed a big public lands conservation bill this summer. But so far the White House's implementation of the new law has been scattershot and controversial.
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It's been almost three months since officials in Washington state first appealed to the Trump administration for millions in federal aid to help a town that was destroyed by a wildfire on Labor Day. -
In the 2020 election, the rural-urban divide sharpened even further from 2016, with Republicans consolidating power in rural America which could help them hold onto the U.S. Senate. -
In rural America, hospitals are at or nearing capacity as coronavirus infections are rising at an alarming rate in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states.
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Grassroots Latino voter energy, changing demographics and the urban-rural divide explain why a Democratic presidential campaign is expected to win Arizona for only a second time since 1948. -
One Trump campaign strategy was to get a large rural turnout to offset expected losses in cities. That strategy failed in the longtime GOP stronghold of Arizona.
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Arizona was heavily contested and Joe Biden has come out on top. In 2016, Trump won the state by four points. Democrats had been hopeful to make gains since they flipped a Senate seat there in 2018.
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President Trump again skipped Phoenix during his latest campaign swing through Arizona this week, as the campaign turns to its 2016 playbook hoping rural voters will decide a close election.