{"id":23073,"date":"2025-01-30T14:29:45","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T13:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fhse-en\/?post_type=events&p=23073"},"modified":"2025-02-14T11:20:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T10:20:42","slug":"cuco-lab-conversations-local-airwaves-national-impact-conservative-rural-talk-radio-in-the-us-and-why-we-need-to-study-it","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fhse-en\/events\/cuco-lab-conversations-local-airwaves-national-impact-conservative-rural-talk-radio-in-the-us-and-why-we-need-to-study-it\/","title":{"rendered":"CuCo Lab Conversations: Local Airwaves, National Impact: Conservative, rural talk radio in the US – and why we need to study it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The CuCo Lab is pleased to invite you to this month’s lab talk by Rebekah Larsen. Rebekah is a Marie Curie Fellow currently affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. In her talk, she will examine the role of rural media landscapes for national politics in the US. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We look forward to see you at the talk, either on site or online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAbstract<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Talk radio in the US has been an enduring player in the media landscape for decades. It tends to be highly partisan (largely conservative) and rife with varieties of misinformation; it is often framed as alternative \u2018infotainment\u2019 on a dying (i.e., not digital) medium. There is thus a comparative dearth of research into talk radio in contemporary media studies and adjacent fields. Yet conservative talk radio – and the stations that carry it – can play outsize sociopolitical and even quasi-journalistic roles today, particularly in rural contexts. I substantiate these arguments via a mixed method, ongoing project focused on several rural talk radio stations in the US. These stations are based in a region with a high density of broadcast media and majority conservative population. In this presentation, I describe how these stations contextualize and normalize topics for their distinct audiences, produce local news as hybrid digital-broadcast actors, and facilitate local and national politics. I will also touch on methodological challenges, including on-the-ground ethnography in partisan environments, as well as capturing and archiving radio data at scale. I end with a brief discussion of why a better understanding of talk radio – and conservative media more generally – is also invaluable to current policy interventions, e.g., to mitigate news desertification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Organisation\/contact<\/strong>: Culture & Computation Lab \/ cucolab@uni.lu<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n