Just after 2 p.m. on May 30, public radio in the Rio Grande Valley — a 4,800-square-mile border region home to 1.4 million Texans — vanished from the airwaves. All Things Considered? Consider it gone. Local news and classical music programming disappeared, too. In their place: all-day Catholic talk radio. The Valley — a four-county area comprising Texas’ southern tip — is now the largest Nielsen radio market in the country without a National Public Radio member station.
For Valley residents, the loss of RGV Public Radio 88 FM is a bitter blow for a booming region in need of more news, not less. “With the loss of NPR, I think we’re getting close to being fairly described as a news media desert,” said Steve Taylor, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Rio Grande Guardian, an online paper and former partner of the NPR station. The Valley — which has seen a 64 percent population spike since 1990 — is known for abysmal voter turnout. Less journalism, Taylor said, assures the problem persists.
So what happened? The backstory is a bit unusual and has everything to do with papistry.
