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