As traditional media collapse, "The Epoch Times" gains a following in rural America

The newspaper racks at the Newton County (Arkansas) Library
are full of issues of The Epoch Times, along with News China 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025.

The New York Times journalist Eli Tan reported last week from Oakdale, California (population 23,181), on the evolution of that community's media ecosystem.  The headline for Tan's story focuses on events from 2020, "It was Just a Rumor on Facebook.  Then a Militia Showed Up" but the story is about the longer-term disintegration of local media, both before and after that 2020 event.  It's a story of how the local media dried up, leaving residents reliant on local Facebook groups, eventually supplemented by The Epoch Times, a publication of Falun Gong, a group associated with right-wing views and its opposition to the Chinese government. I want to focus on that part of the story because it relates to something I observed first-hand in my home county this year.  First, I'll share a bit more background on Oakdale, which is in Stanislaus County, in California's Central Valley:   

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.

Many issues of News China magazine
were also on display in the 
Newton County Library

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. 

Here is more coverage of the rural news desert phenomenon. 

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. 

* * *  

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.

* * *

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.

Newton County Library, Feb. 2025
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

Here is another post about misinformation influencing politics in rural communities.  Tan's story in the NYT continues:

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.

This brought to mind what I saw in the Newton County (Arkansas) Library (in my hometown) when I visited in February, 2025:  the newspaper rack was dominated by just two publications, The Epoch Times and the local(ish) Harrison Daily Times, from neighboring Boone County.  Oddly, there was no copy of the local weekly, The Newton County Times, on display.  (It is owned by the same company that owns the Harrison Daily Times and currently operates out of the same office in Boone County--that is, The Newton County Times has no physical presence in Newton County except when the reporter comes over from Harrison, Boone County's seat, to cover events like local government meetings).  

I was back in Newton County in early April and again popped into the library.  Nothing had changed in terms of what was on display--well, the issues of The Epoch Times and The Harrison Daily Times were more recent because it was April and no longer February.  On this latter visit, the librarian was present, and so I asked her about the prominence of The Epoch Times--and why she carried it at all.  She said that a patron had requested it.  My facial response was skeptical, perhaps even as strong as an eye roll.  Though what I was really judging was her decision to display this propaganda so prominently, especially when there was so little counter-balance of real news.  Not a copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, let alone any national newspaper, in sight.    

Now, however, that I've read this New York Times story, I'm skeptical in a different way about what the librarian told me.  I suggest The Epoch Times is being sent to lots of local libraries, and those without much else--and those who don't see how biased it is--simply display it.  After all, they have plenty of room, and it's no tax at all on their budgets.   

It seems this is an important bit of information toward understanding the media ecosystem that has led to a right-ward shift in the rural vote. 

It also reminds me of some billboards for The Epoch Times I saw on California's I-80 in the last year.  Those billboards proclaimed The Epoch Times the most trusted news source in America, a claim that made me very skeptical.   Here's a story about those billboards and how they showed up in Tampa, Florida. from Axios.