Many rural voters tend to dismiss facts presented in the national news media because those facts don’t square with the world they see.
When I’ve talked to rural white voters since the 2016 election, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to discuss any stories from the “mainstream” media - and sometimes even from Fox News. Local media provides a necessary counterbalance to national narratives
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So if the solution to these problems probably involves more robust local media - and specifically more robust local media online - well, good luck figuring out how to pay for that. It’s impossible to contradict fake news with “real news” when the sources offering that real news aren’t trusted.īut local media outlets, which used to carry that sort of clout within their communities, are being economically strangled by an environment that increasingly requires turning to nationally syndicated programs and stories, rather than the sort of local focus that used to mark these outlets.
No one has been sure how to puncture that conservative media bubble, to combat the narratives that lots of rural white voters have come to believe are true. That’s led to the proliferation of so-called “fake news” stories, widely spread on Facebook, which are sometimes outright untrue and sometimes just a hugely misleading presentation of a true news story. The slow death of local media has contributed to the epistemic closure in conservative circles, especially in rural areas. But I find the high-level point of Politico’s study - Trump was more successful in places where there was a legitimate news vacuum of one form or another - persuasive.)
(A necessary caveat: The Politico study has some flaws in how it defines a “news desert.” Nieman Labs has more on that point. A recent Politico study, which found that Donald Trump outperformed Mitt Romney in areas without a robust local media, put numbers to something I’ve felt intuitively since the 2016 election: that the nationalization of the media (a movement that includes websites like Vox) has been good for news junkies but not as good for those who want and need news about their local communities.
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