Delegitimizing Rural Public Health Departments: How Decaying Local News Ecologies, Misinformation, and Radicalization Undermine Community Storytelling Networks

Author(s)

Nik Usher, University of San DiegoFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

Journal Title

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Volume Number

707

Issue Number

1

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162231215655

Version

Publisher PDF: the final published version of the article, with professional formatting and typesetting

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC License

Disciplines

Communication

Abstract

This article considers the public communication challenges that health officials in rural America faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyze the role that public health officials played in communicating news and information about the pandemic in 29 rural counties in Illinois. These officials were challenged by a diminished reporting capacity among local media outlets, and by a political radicalization of local Republicans, who no longer regarded local media as trusted nodes in local storytelling networks. I find that while public health officials can help fill a community’s critical information needs about risk and emergency, the public’s take-up of this information depends on sociocultural and political forces that shape the broader communication context.

Digital USD Citation

Usher, Nik, "Delegitimizing Rural Public Health Departments: How Decaying Local News Ecologies, Misinformation, and Radicalization Undermine Community Storytelling Networks" (2023). Communication Studies: Faculty Scholarship. 15.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/commstudies_facpub/15