This Is What Happens When Local News Outlets Disappear

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a deep reconnaissance on one of the country's many so-called "news deserts"—localities where conventional media has completely broken down or disappeared entirely. Reporting and writing has been replaced by a smorgasbord of news sites, "influencers," and various content producers on many platforms. For a news desert, there certainly is a lot of thorny scrub brush and a lot of poisonous reptiles out there in Oakdale, California.

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

"The left"? Ah, well. Both Sides never dies.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale—it was the media itself. Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief. Of the 80 Oakdale residents The New York Times spoke to for this article, not a single one subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post.

And the result is that, under California's blank and pitiless sun, something akin to Yeats' rough beast emerges into this news desert, slouching toward Oakdale to be born.

But seeking truth in a post-journalism world of Facebook groups and online influencers has left some Oakdale residents feeling less informed than before. And efforts to manage misinformation that culminated in an armed militia storming the town in 2020 have changed the very nature of the community...Then, the militia incident happened.

Julie Logan, an in-home health care worker in Oakdale, can still remember the scene: It was a weekend morning in June, and the downtown farmers’ market had been replaced by a scene resembling a military operation. Gunmen patrolled the sidewalks dressed head to toe in brown camouflage; store windows were boarded up; some of the men perched from the rooftops in tactical gear, brandishing rifles.

Why all this Snake Plissken cosplay? Glad you asked.

The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment. They waited and waited. But the protesters never came. The militia was hired by the owner of a downtown bar called the H-B Saloon, the police said. The scene confused even the local authorities, and Jeff Dirkse, the sheriff of Stanislaus County, took to Facebook to decry “rumors that are running rampant on social media,” but assured residents there was no threat of an attack.

I have heard these rumors all my life. To believe them, one has to believe that local police sat back and watched armed protesters load up onto buses to ride off into the night. That takes an organization. That takes... process. Those rumors are never, ever true. The primary vehicle for the mongering of this rumor in Oakdale was a heretofore civic events Facebook page that was hijacked by the local loonies before its keeper noticed. She banned political discussions and made the page private. And you know what happened next...Censorship!!!!

But the new focus on moderation had an unintended effect: Frustrated residents whose comments were removed began to create their own groups in protest, with names like Oakdale Incident Feed First Amendment Approved and Oakdale Incident Feed UNFILTERED. Soon enough, the spinoffs were becoming more popular than the original group. Among the largest of these Facebook groups is Stanislaus News, which has 75,000 members and has become the go-to source of information for crime in the area. (The sprawling county has around 500,000 residents.) The group was founded by Mark Davis, a former bail bonds salesman in the nearby city of Modesto who was himself banned from a different group dedicated to local news in 2019. Along with his wife, Mr. Davis spends hours a day monitoring local police and emergency services scanners, translating the radio codes into updates that are often posted hours ahead of local news reports.

Doing His Own Research!

By all accounts, Oakdale started to go off the rails during the pandemic. That curious episode in our history led to such interesting characters in the NYT piece as the gun store owner who has traded CNN and Fox News for Joe Rogan, the Spanish mom-and-pop barber shop where Pop has developed a jones for the propaganda sheet, Epoch Times, and Charlie Kirk, while Mom hangs in there watching Telemundo, and the woman who works retail at a downtown department store who left the mainstream via Her Own Research into medical issues during the COVID shutdown, going so far as to abandon her television set in favor of Internet "influencers" she can watch on her computer.

Places like Oakdale are going to feel the sharp end of what's coming as the president's agenda really gets rolling. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear spoke recently about the devastating effect cutting Medicaid will have on rural health care. From Semafor:

“I tell you what will move people more than anything else, and that’s the potential Medicaid cuts that could come out of Congress,” the Democrat said. “Medicaid covers the people we love the most in this world, our parents and our kids,” he said. “Fifty percent of all Kentucky kids are covered by Medicaid. Seventy percent of all of our long-term costs are covered by Medicaid. And rural health care will cease to exist if they do major cuts.”

Beshear went on to elucidate the effect that the president's manic tariff policy is going to have on his constituents.

“Canada has been an amazing ally to the United States, and they love bourbon… and they have followed us into just about every international conflict we’ve been in,” he said. “They’re not just looking at reciprocal tariffs, they’re taking American products off the shelf, and it’s hard to blame them, based on the way that they’re being treated.”

Trump is hurting America economically, risking global security, and drawing enemies from all parties, Beshear said. “I’ve never seen anything in politics more attributable to one person and one person alone than his tariff decisions that are devastating our economy,” he said. Beshear said that Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Mitch McConnell have echoed his criticism on tariffs, quipping that “[if] Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell and I all agree on something, it’s probably because it’s true.”

(Note to the Governor: Yes, that's probably true, but when you go out on a limb against the president, don't expect either McConnell or Senator Aqua Buddha to be out there behind you.)

These are the places that voted for the president, and these are the places about which he stopped giving a good goddamn about as soon as the polls closed in November. And now, in Oakdale, they can't even find a reliable explanation for what's happening to them.