Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

WV MetroNews

West Virginia regional; news mostly neutral, talk and commentary moderate-to-conservative

Owned byWest Virginia Radio Corporation, a privately held Morgantown-based broadcaster. Its owner is John R. Raese, a businessman and former Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. The Raese family also long owned The Dominion Post newspaper, which it sold to Ogden Newspapers in 2024.
FundingCommercial advertising and sponsorships, mainly radio spots and web ads. It also earns revenue from affiliate stations, which carry its network news and sports. It has no public or state funding and no paywall.
On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

MetroNews launched on August 12, 1985, as a statewide radio news network. It was the brainchild of West Virginia Radio Corporation president Dale Miller and owner John Raese, and Hoppy Kercheval anchored the first newscast. Over the following decades it grew into a network of affiliate stations across West Virginia, and it added a website and sports coverage, including high school and college game broadcasts. Kercheval, who joined the company in 1976, created the call-in show 'Talkline' in 1993, and it became a main venue for state political debate. Kercheval announced in late 2024 that he would retire from hosting Talkline, and he continues to write commentary and podcasts. Its owner, Raese, has been a Republican candidate and a political figure, and the outlet's call-in and opinion programming generally takes a moderate-to-conservative view. Its daily reporting focuses on state government, the legislature, the governor's office, weather, and sports, and it relies heavily on official sources and press releases. I did not find a documented record of coverage of the second Trump administration specifically, so the 'mostly neutral' tag rests on its regional news focus and the editorial leanings described above. It is a commercial regional outlet, and its work has not drawn major documented controversies in the sources I found.

Sources

  1. West Virginia MetroNews - Wikipedia
  2. MetroNews, for 40 years the Voice of West Virginia - WV MetroNews
  3. MetroNews: Forty Years and Counting - WV MetroNews
  4. WV MetroNews Talkline host Kercheval to retire from show - The Intermountain
  5. Morgantown's Dominion Post is bought by West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers - WV MetroNews

Profile compiled 2026-10-25; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record