Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar in One Ohio County. The Hometown Newspaper Is Helping.

Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar in One Ohio County. The Hometown Newspaper Is Helping.by Miranda Green, Floodlight, Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster. The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.