Title: How and why American journalism (accidentally) amplifies anti-democratic actors: Small town extremists, media storms, and a broken news industry

Abstract: 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 hijack 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 to the rule of law have been overlooked. This research asks, first what features of local political ecologies that might facilitate the rise of small town anti-democratic extremists? Second, how does the political economy of the contemporary  news ecosystem–local, regional, national, and partisan media–serve to amplify these bad actors? Ultimately, this case study considers how small-town extremists are enabled by the structural, cultural, and normative dimensions of democratic life that they seek to undermine, especially the difficulty the institutional news media faces in covering anti-democratic actors.