Advancing Vital Research Agendas in Political Communication Research: A Forum on Visual Misinformation and the Problems of News Deserts

It is a pleasure to share two new exciting Forum articles that articulate clear research agendas concerning critical issues in political communication scholarship. Yingdan Lu, Yilang Peng, and Shen Cuihua’s “An Agenda for Studying Credibility Perceptions of Visual Misinformation” identifies two major limitations in contemporary scholarship studying political misinformation: 1) the comparative lack of scholarship that incorporates analyses of visual misinformation and 2) an incomplete understanding of how visual features and formats are associated with credibility judgments. Nikki Usher and Sanghoon KimLeffingwell’s “The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy” critiques the concept of “news deserts,” arguing that the term oversimplifies our understanding of place, suffers from problems of inconsistent measurement, and over-valorizes the role of local newspapers in democracies.