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Series:   Elements in Politics and Communication

Amplifying Extremism

Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2025

Nik Usher  and
Jessica C. Hagman
Nik Usher
Affiliation:
University of San Diego
Jessica C. Hagman
Affiliation:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Summary

Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News' Ingraham Angle. This newly empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would go on to steer the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics, but the threats posed by small-town politicians have been overshadowed by national-level politicians. This microstudy of a single politician's debut in the public eye showcases a novel approach to media corpus construction that combines proprietary and open databases, aggregated search tools, and targeted searching, and includes local, regional, and national news across digital-first, radio, news publishers, broadcast and cable television, and social media. The Element provides unique insights into how American journalism creates space for small-town extremists to gain power, especially given declines in local news.
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Keywords

extremismjournalismlocal newspartisan mediaCOVID

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Type
Element
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Series: Elements in Politics and Communication
Online ISBN: 9781009668798
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 12 June 2025

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