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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The Rosebud Sioux Tribe is vaccinating its community at rates faster than the rest of South Dakota. That mirrors a trend in Indian Country, which has been hard-hit by the coronavirus.
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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. -
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.
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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.
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Rural "critical access" hospitals, often some of the largest employers in small towns, have been operating on razor-thin margins throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
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The pandemic has exposed disparities in healthcare among people of color, and tribal communities are among the hardest hit. The state is trying to change that with free mass testing.
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He has been praised for his handling of the pandemic, which is becoming a key issue in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines. Montana now has the lowest coronavirus infection rate in the U.S. -
Conservative challenges to statewide stay-at-home orders are mounting in counties that have few coronavirus cases. "This has become a rural versus urban issue," political scientist Kathy Cramer says.
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There is growing economic pressure to reopen national parks and ease travel restrictions even as many states are still seeing a rise in coronavirus cases.
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As the wildfire season is beginning, some wild land firefighters are worried their safety could be at risk since the government has been slow to adopt new COVID-19 protocols.
