news deserts – In Elizabethtown, North Carolina, residents say local news has dried up in rural counties and left them feeling unable to make informed decisions—at a time when national debates over “fake news” are further straining trust.
On a regular week in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, a group of men in their late 60s gathers at the Corner Cafe. They talk about what’s happening in their community, the kind of conversations that used to be reinforced by local reporting—only now they’re happening without it.
The problem, several residents say, is that local news has virtually dried up in their rural county and in neighboring counties. When that coverage disappears, so does more than information. People describe feeling left in the dark, and they say they don’t feel equipped to make informed decisions.
Penny Abernathy puts it bluntly: “I’m not gonna vote if I can’t get the information.”
Her frustration lands in the middle of a larger map of decline. Like much of the country, roughly two-thirds of North Carolina’s counties are considered news deserts. In those places, the absence of local journalism doesn’t just make elections and everyday governance harder to follow. It also sharpens a crisis of trust in the news media.
That trust breakdown doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The story has been moving in two directions at once: while local coverage has thinned in places like rural North Carolina. national political conflict has made every piece of reporting feel like it comes with a fight attached. Since President Donald Trump began dismissing criticism and allegations in the press as “fake news. ” journalists have often been jeered at conservative political rallies.
When you stitch these facts together, the pressure becomes visible. Rural residents can’t access the reporting they need to judge what’s happening close to home. while national political language trains audiences to see criticism of the press as something to mock or reject. In Elizabethtown. that means the question isn’t just whether people trust journalists—it’s whether they have a way to verify reality at all.
This week, the discussion turns to how American journalism got here and what repair might look like. Reveal partnered with the podcast Scene on Radio and its hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika to examine the cracked foundation of the Fourth Estate—especially in communities where local news has fallen away so completely that even voting can feel out of reach without reliable information.
North Carolina Elizabethtown Corner Cafe local news news deserts journalism crisis trust in media Penny Abernathy fake news Donald Trump Reveal Scene on Radio John Biewen Chenjerai Kumanyika
If the local news is gone how do they even know whats going on? People just get random Facebook posts now.
I saw something like this before, like news deserts or whatever, and honestly it makes sense. If there’s no paper or station, then everyone thinks everything is fake news anyway.
So basically they’re blaming Trump for people not trusting the news? Kinda wild. I mean I don’t trust the press either, but it’s not like the Corner Cafe men need journalism to vote.
Corner Cafe sounds like a church group but with coffee lol. But yeah I get the point, if you can’t verify stuff then people just guess. Also I thought “fake news” was mainly from the left, so the whole article feels one-sided… unless I missed it.