It Was Just a Rumor on Facebook. Then a Militia Showed Up.

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.

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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.