How misinformation and partisan ‘new media’ changed a California town
And for decades, its media diet was also classically all-American. For decades, the media diet of Oakdale, Calif., was also classically American. On Sunday mornings, copies of local papers were stacked on the doorsteps. After the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, the pandemic and the decline of newspapers in the area, the local media has shrunk. By 2024, the trust that Oakdale residents had in the traditional media was gone. Instead, they turn to podcasters and internet influencers for their political news. The New York Times interviewed 80 Oakdale residents for this article. None of them subscribed to regional news sites, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. 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. The town of Oakdale became particularly tight-knit during the pandemic. It was bonded by the uncertain nature of the virus and the politics of an upcoming election, as well as the difficulty of closing restaurants and retail shops in an area where small businesses provide the economic backbone. For years, the groups were harmless. As new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections. 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. The protesters never arrived. The group was founded by Ms. Logan in 2015. By 2020, it had more than 17,000 participants. “We were overwhelmed.”
The militia was hired by the owner of a downtown bar called the H-B Saloon, the police said. Even local authorities were confused by the scene. Jeff Dirkse was the Stanislaus County Sheriff, who took to Facebook in order to denounce “rumors” that have been spreading on social media, but reassured residents that there was no attack. The owner of H-B refused to comment when reached by phone. Logan enlisted Kari Conversa, a pet care store owner, and Christopher Smith, an Oakdale City Council member and commercial plumbing distribution manager to help with fact-checking. She enlisted Kari Constanta, the owner of a pet store, and Christopher Smith as moderators and fact-checkers. The spin-off groups became more popular than their original counterparts. Toni Ahrens is a wood carver who started Oakdale Incident feed DOUBLE UNFILTERED. She did this after a moderator had removed one of her political comments. 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 is home to around 500,000 people. Mark Davis founded the group. He was a former bail bond salesman from Modesto, who had been banned in 2019 from another group that was dedicated to local news. 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. One of Mr. Davis’s rules states that the group is “pro law enforcement”. If you’re not, this isn’t the group for your.
Some local residents claim that Mr. Davis rules have hindered their efforts to share important news. For example, in December, surveillance footage of a fatal shooting occurred at a convenience shop. The sheriff’s account of the incident was contradicted by the video. The members of the group started to share new information about the case, but Mr. Davis intervened and banned them. Coronado claimed that after visiting the crime site to share his findings in person, comments were removed within minutes. He was banned a day later. “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. The former horse roping and rodeo news outlets are no longer in business. In an interview, Mr. Vander Veen stated that the town was not competing with the Facebook groups. “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 greater skepticism has been expressed about everything from vaccines to the price of eggs. He has gravitated towards podcasters such as Joe Rogan, another veteran. “It used be that you only trusted one source for news,” said Mr. Smith. “Now, news is everywhere and I treat it with a grain or two of salt.” When asked if he gets his news through social media, Smith opened up his Instagram account to reveal an A.I. generated image of Trump riding a Bald Eagle. “You can’t trust that either,” he said.
Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. The Epoch Times is a strange newspaper that is found in barbershops, clock repair shops and diners all over town. The outlet didn’t respond to our 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. John Ortega, her husband, liked the reporting and bought a subscription. Mr. Ortega stated that the reporting of this outlet “felt straightforward enough” and in recent years, the paper added a California section. Ms. Ortega follows current events through La Mesa Caliente on Telemundo, a Spanish language talk show hosted by four females. “But we both just want the facts,” he said. “But we both want the facts,” said Mr. Ortega.
Sarah Jones is a 35-year-old retail worker who lives downtown. She said that her attitudes toward the media and her views on health and wellness changed in 2018 when she gave birth to her first child. Other accounts, such as Real News No Bullshit, are anonymously managed. Jimmy Freeman is a 50-year-old newshound who works alongside Mr. Smith in his gun shop. 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 fail to inform us of what we saw? Users can 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 listens to MSNBC while working in his downtown shoe repair shop. He has done so for as long as Harvey 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 is a therapist and leader of Oakdale’s progressive group. She drove to the event that day with anxiety, recalling the militia from five years earlier. 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.
