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With its horse-trodden roads, endless fields of almond blossoms and cowboy heritage, the 20,000 person town of Oakdale, Calif., fits the American West of imagination. And for decades, its media diet was classically all-American, too.
Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even had two media outlets dedicated to rodeo and horse roping news.
But that version of Oakdale is a thing of the past.
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.
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.
Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country. That trend is almost certain to accelerate, with the Trump administration moving to claw back funding for NPR and PBS, which would slash local broadcasting stations’ budgets, and prioritizing hyperpartisan “new media” in the White House press briefings.
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.
The Cowboy Capital of the World
Tucked between mountain ranges and rivers in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Oakdale is only 100 miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area, but it has the feel of another world.
It’s a place where the highways are dotted with fruit stands and neighbors leave baked goods on one another’s porches, with a large community of Latino immigrants and a proud cowboy history, memorialized in two separate museums. During the pandemic, the town became especially tight-knit, bonded by the uncertainty of the virus, the politics of an election year and the hardship of closing down restaurants and retail stores in a place where small businesses are an economic lifeblood.
As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.
With residents stuck at home during the pandemic, the groups thrived. But as new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections.
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.
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 men were drawn to Oakdale by a false rumor spread in a Facebook group called All Things Oakdale, which over the years had become the town’s primary forum for local news. Started in 2015 by Ms. Logan, the group had amassed more than 17,000 members by 2020.
“That was the moment we knew something had to change,” she said. “We were overwhelmed.”
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. (Reached by phone, the owner of H-B declined to comment.)
Ms. Logan made the Facebook group private and banned political discussions altogether. To help with fact-checking and moderation, she enlisted Kari Conversa, a pet care store owner, and Christopher Smith, an Oakdale City Council member and commercial plumbing distribution manager.
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.
Toni Ahrens, a wood carving artist, started Oakdale Incident Feed DOUBLE UNFILTERED after “experiencing the filtering first hand,” when a moderator removed a political comment of hers. Her new group now has 9,500 members — three times the number of subscribers of Oakdale’s weekly newspaper.
But Ms. Ahrens acknowledged that certain administrators have prioritized the kinds of misinformation and political discussions that caused them to be banned in the first place. And, more often than not, these residents lean conservative.
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.
The group has also become a repository for Mr. Davis’s personal musings about Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s so called Department of Government Efficiency, to the frustration of many residents who just want to read about local happenings.
“THIS PAGE WAS NOT INTENDED FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES,” one commenter wrote on a recent post about Mr. Musk.
The group is closely aligned with the Modesto Police Department, which uses it to make daily posts of its own. “This is a PRO law enforcement group,” reads one of Mr. Davis’s rules. “If you are not, then this is not the group for you.”
Some residents say Mr. Davis’s rules have hurt their efforts to spread important news, like in December, when surveillance footage posted to the group of a fatal shooting at a convenience store appeared to contradict the sheriff’s report of how the altercation began. Members of the group began to post new details about the case — until Mr. Davis stepped in to ban them.
Blake Coronado, who runs a nonprofit that helps find missing people and relies on Facebook groups for engagement, was one of the members who posted. After visiting the crime scene in person to share his findings, Mr. Coronado said, comments on his post were disabled within minutes. A day later, he was banned.
“I was shocked, because to my knowledge we didn’t even break any rules,” he said in an interview. “If we’re not going to hold our police department accountable, how is that helping our community?”
Mr. Davis and the Modesto Police Department did not respond to requests for comments.
Local news around Oakdale hasn’t always been this way. In the early 2000s, the Modesto Bee, the largest regional paper owned by the newspaper chain McClatchy, had over a hundred reporters; it now has around a dozen. Both of its former rodeo and horse roping news outlets are now out of business.
The town is still able to support a weekly newspaper called The Oakdale Leader, which shares a handful of reporters with nine other local newspapers in the Central Valley, all owned by Hank Vander Veen, its publisher and a former circulation director at the Modesto Bee.
“We’re not trying to compete with it,” Mr. Vander Veen said of the Facebook groups in an interview. “I still feel like some people go to us, whether it’s our website or our newspaper, for a more trusted news.”
‘Now the News Comes From Everywhere’
It isn’t just local news habits that are changing in Oakdale. Since the pandemic, a wider skepticism for everything including vaccines and the price of eggs has changed the way people approach information in general: The thinking is, do your own research, and trust neither side.
Fred Smith, a gun store owner in Oakdale, grew up watching broadcasts of the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite when he was called “the most trusted man in America.” Until recently, he was a regular viewer of CNN and Fox News after work and estimates he spent over $100,000 advertising his store in the print pages of the Modesto Bee in the early 2000s.
But that trust has waned as traditional cable outlets have started to feel “more like entertainment than news,” he said. He’s gravitated toward podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a fellow veteran. But he doesn’t necessarily trust all the information on those podcasts, either.
“It used to be you had one source of news and you trusted it,” Mr. Smith said. “Now the news comes from everywhere, and I take it all with a grain of salt.”
He now finds himself inundated with “more news than he’s ever felt in his lifetime” in the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, and he doesn’t trust any of it. Asked if he ever gets his news from social media, Mr. Smith opened his Instagram feed to show an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump riding a bald eagle. “You can’t trust that either,” he said.
Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. In barber shops, clock repair stores and diners across town, copies of a peculiar newspaper appear on tables and bookshelves: The Epoch Times.
The media outlet is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, and it is known to include right-wing misinformation with an anti-China slant. (The outlet did not respond to a request for comment.) A weekly print subscription costs less than $15 a year, but most store owners in Oakdale said they didn’t initially pay for a subscription — the editions just started showing up in the mail during the pandemic.
Beatriz Ortega, a hairdresser in Oakdale, first came across The Epoch Times in the summer of 2020, when free copies arrived at the door of her barbershop. Her husband, John, enjoyed the reporting, so he purchased a subscription. The outlet’s reporting, Mr. Ortega said, “feels straightforward enough,” and the paper has in recent years added a California news section.
The Ortegas’ news habits couldn’t be more different. Ms. Ortega keeps up with current events exclusively through La Mesa Caliente, a Spanish-language talk show on Telemundo hosted by four women. Mr. Ortega gets his news from an orbit of right-wing male YouTube personalities like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino, who was recently named deputy director of the F.B.I.
Their differing news diets can often become points of contention, Mr. Ortega said, when it feels like they’re getting information about the same events from entirely different worlds. “But we both just want the facts,” he said.
Sarah Jones, 35, who works at a retail store downtown, said her attitude toward the media changed along with her beliefs about health and wellness in 2018, when she had her first child and began to distrust conventional medical advice.
By 2020, she had gotten rid of her television, replacing cable news programs like CNN and Fox News with mostly female news influencers on Instagram who aggregate the news into short video clips and graphics.
One of the accounts Ms. Jones follows, House Inhabit, is run by Jessica Reed-Kraus, a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fan who Mr. Trump recently added to the White House press pool. Others accounts she follows like Real News No Bullshit are managed anonymously.
Working alongside Mr. Smith at his gun store is Jimmy Freeman, 50, who is known around the shop as a news hound. But whatever trust Mr. Freeman had in mainstream media disappeared while watching the last Biden-Trump presidential debate.
Watching President Biden struggle to string together complete sentences, he couldn’t help but think that the press corps in Washington that was supposed to keep the country informed — including Oakdale — had let him down.
“It felt like a failure,” Mr. Freeman said. “How could the media not tell us what we were seeing?”
His solution to what he saw as media bias was a website called Ground News, which aggregates reports from different news outlets and gives them each a bias score on the spectrum of left, center and right, along with a “factuality” rating. Users can even toggle between A.I. generated summaries of news stories written from different political perspectives.
“You grab both sides, bring them toward the middle, and that’s usually where the truth is,” Mr. Freeman said. At $8 a month, it is the only news subscription he pays for.
Some Old News Diets Remain
Liberal residents in Oakdale say their news diets haven’t changed as much as their conservative counterparts. Harvey Melgoza, 67, still listens to MSNBC on the radio while working at his shoe repair store downtown, like he has for as long as he can remember. And he will sometimes read The Oakdale Leader on the occasion that his neighbor, Doug, drops off extra copies at his doorstep.
Since the start of the pandemic, he has watched some of his neighbors embrace conspiracy theories, or grow suddenly fearful of Mexican immigrants coming across the border.
MSNBC “might sometimes have a bias,” he said, “but at least it gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world.”
On April 5, dozens of Oakdale residents prepared to protest Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk in Modesto, among the hundreds of protests happening that day around the country.
Fliers with details of the event were being deleted from Facebook groups, so they turned to email threads to share information instead. Marjorie Sturdy, a therapist in Oakdale and the leader of the town’s progressive club, drove to the protest that day with a pit of anxiety in her stomach, remembering the militia five years ago.
Then came some relief — the Modesto Police assured her, in private, that it was monitoring Facebook for dangerous threats. Aside from a few angry passers-by, the rally drew hundreds and went on as planned.
“It gave me some optimism,” Ms. Sturdy said, “that things could change.”
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
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