Your Call
The secret playbook behind efforts to kill solar in an Ohio county
This is your call. I'm Rose Aguilar. Coming up tomorrow, journalist Paolo Ramos will discuss the election results and her book "Defectors, the Rise of the Latino Far Right and what it means for America." On Wednesday, we will continue our series on Project 2025. If you have a show idea or a guest idea, you can email your call at kalw.org. Now we are discussing a joint investigation by ProPublica, Floodlight, and the Toes Center for Digital Journalism about how fossil fuel interests have been working behind the scenes to derail a proposed solar energy project in Knox County, Ohio. According to the investigation, the campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests, a former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county's largest employer, and one of the world's biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper that is now in the hands of metric media. They operate websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage and will learn more about metric media during this segment. Joining us are two guests who worked on this investigation. Miranda Green is an award-winning investigative journalist and director of investigations at Floodlight News, where she oversees their national investigative team and reports on climate-focused projects. Her reporting focuses on the intersection of dark money, the fossil fuel industrial complex, and the manipulation of news to spread misinformation. Hi, Miranda. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We're also joined by Jennifer Smith Richards, a reporter with ProPublica. She most recently worked for the Chicago Tribune where her work exposed student ticketing at school, abusive educators, government, misspending, and lapses and police accountability and the mistreatment of students with disabilities. Hi, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Well, thanks to you and your team for this important investigation. I think what's so crucial about this piece at a time when so many reporters are losing their jobs and then in the case of the Mount Vernon newspaper and being in the hands of metric media, newspapers are being bought by these companies that most of us have never heard of. This investigation not only shines a light on what's happening in this county in Ohio, but it's really a microcosm of what's happening in other cities and counties across the country. So, Jennifer, what piqued your interest in this story? How did you first learn about what was happening in Knox County, Ohio? Well, I'll say that Miranda has been covering this type of interference by oil and gas in news making for some time. And so she actually stumbled across the Mount Vernon news story, but we had a really interesting crossover. I had covered, you know, things in Ohio. I had been a reporter in Ohio for more than a decade and was really familiar with the Mount Vernon news. I had read it. It was a very well-known and well-regarded community newspaper that had been family-owned for more than 100 years. And so, as soon as Miranda, you know, raised that it was under new ownership, I was immediately hooked and interested to find out how the news coverage had changed since the purchase. Well, and just talking about the Mount Vernon news, you report that the first article in the Mount Vernon news last fall was about a planned solar farm. And it noted that residents were, quote, 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. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about this, Miranda, how you came across this story and just the integral role that the Mount Vernon news is playing here? Sure, thanks. I have been looking into this concept of media manipulation at the hands of the oil and gas industry and the power companies for a couple of years now. Kind of what we're seeing across the United States is this kind of dual clash between the fact that there is a lot of local media. There's fewer local newsrooms and newspapers across the country, paired with a larger distrust in mainstream media. And what that means is that people still are looking for information, but they are finding fewer places that they trust to go to find their news. And there are certain organizations and businesses that have been taking advantage of that. I've written a few articles about both oil and gas companies and power companies, both in the Southeast and actually in Richmond, California, where they have established new newspapers, purchased old newspapers, and even engaged in pay-to-play practices where they're essentially paying for specific positive coverage across websites across the country to essentially shape positive messaging towards oil and gas at a time when most newspapers are critical of the oil and gas industry because science says that it's responsible for climate change. And as I was digging into this and looking at other areas where this was happening across the country, I came across what was happening in the Mount Vernon News in Mount Vernon, Ohio. And what was happening there was a little bit different. The company that had recently purchased the paper is called Metric Media. And it is actually part of a conglomerate of news-seeming websites called Pink Slime Sites. Essentially, it is a moniker that people give for these websites because they appear to be real news, but if you look closely, they're not what they seem. They typically are conservative leaning. They tend to not have both sides of the story. They don't always have bylines. And what was interesting is that while Metric Media has been around for quite some time, it had never purchased a paper before, an actual real newsroom. And Mount Vernon News is one of the first that we found where they had done this. And Jen and I were really interested in digging into how that was shaping the coverage in this small rural Ohio community. And when we started digging, we realized it was very interesting timing because it just so happened that there was a new solar farm that had been proposed in the community that was getting a lot of flack from the new coverage at the Mount Vernon News. You do such a great job of telling the story. And I'll just provide a few points and then I hope people can read this piece. So the Mount Vernon News had been owned by the same family since 1939 for decades at chronicled local doings from city council meetings to the county fair. Based on your reporting, it sounds like it was a very important paper for the community. But like so many papers across this country at the height in the early 2000s, before paper started hemorrhaging ad dollars, they employed 15 full time reporters. But by 2020, they were barely hanging on. And Kate Culbertson, who owned the paper and the building knew that it was time to sell. She just had no choice. She couldn't even pay for repairs for the building. And so here comes metric media. They paid at least a million dollars for the Mount Vernon News. And as you say, it's the first time it ever established a news organization. And what you dug up, again, it's head spinning, but here are the same players that we've been talking about whenever we follow the money, metric media's nonprofit arm has received 1.4 million for quote, general operations from Donors Trust, a dark money group that received significant money from the Charles and David Coke. And then the eight company network that metric is part of has ties to the oil and gas industry Titan, Tim Dunn, the shipping magnate, Richard Yulein, and PayPal co-founder Peter Teal. So this is it was just fascinating to read Miranda because these names keep popping up whenever we do shows about oil and gas and how they're getting involved in spreading misinformation about well, in this case, solar. Yes, it's part of a growing playbook that I started realizing as I was doing my coverage on this, you know, they're the oil and gas industry to get back to this idea is that, you know, not that long ago, journalists, to cover climate change from a perspective where you quoted scientists who believed climate change was human caused and climate deniers, those who argued that humans play no role in climate. We have moved past that we are now at a point as climate reporters, where we can just go with the science. The science shows that climate change is real. It's happening. The oil and gas industry is in part responsible. The greenhouse gas emissions are largely due to air pollution coming from fossil fuels. And we now can focus on the task ahead of us, which is what is the country, what is the world doing about it or not doing about it. And that has put a major spin at the oil and gas industry. And specifically, a lot of these key players who made their money from oil and gas. So Timothy Dunn is the CEO of a major oil and gas industry organization in Texas. We know that the Koch brothers made their money largely on pipelines. And so what is interesting here is we are finding this very, this intermix between these billionaire players who made their money in this industry and want to see the industry continues to succeed, which means they do not want regulation because regulation is ultimately bad for business. So they're pushing back a lot of this perception about fossil fuels being bad, about fossil fuels needing to be replaced with clean energy and energy solar ions. They also happen to largely by large B donors to conservative politics. And so what we see in these newspapers and we see in Mount Vernon is that what's interesting is that a lot of this influence is actually happening in places where people are ready set up to be receptive to this positioning that oil and gas is good. That solar is questionable. They are pro conservative ideals. They are skeptical of change. And it's essentially just doubling down on this idea that these gas jobs are important there for everyone. And we can't really trust new technology because it's questionable, it's new and it's not reliable. So let's talk about the project at hand, the Frasier Solar Project. It's a very large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels, which would power around 19,000 homes. Jennifer, can you tell us how this project came about? Yeah, Ohio is a really interesting place for solar development right now. It has become a place that has the resources of agricultural land that solar companies are looking for and developers are looking for. And this particular project came about, you know, basically because of that availability, there is some industry that is growing in the area. This is in central Ohio. There is a new chip plant coming in. And so there are opportunities and needs for more energy generation. So the developer, the Frasier Solar developer came into this area, spoke with some landowners and found that there was some desire from those landowners to lease their land for the purpose of a solar project. And what has made this extra interesting in Ohio is that the state, not so long ago, has taken away some of the state regulator's power to approve or deny solar projects and handed it essentially to local government. And so what we're seeing right now in Ohio is a tension between, you know, local governments that may not want a solar farm to build in their communities and people who are looking at, you know, the greater good and the need for additional energy production, who very much want to approve these projects. So this particular project has made its way through the state regulatory process. And we're now waiting for a decision on whether or not it can be built. So we're still waiting for a decision. In the meantime, you've got residents bombarded with dubious claims, according to your reporting that solar panels are toxic. These are packing local meetings. This is tearing apart some members of the community. And then there's lies being spread about politicians. I mean, I mean, it's really incredible to read. So you've got these bright yellow, no industrial solar yard signs that have sprung up everywhere. Rich PR, a third generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his land to open road renewables. This is the Texas company developing the solar project said people are so radicalized. They're not thinking clearly. You also write that politicians who did not forcefully denounce the project were attacked in Mount Vernon news stories. So it sounds like Miranda, every aspect of this community has been affected by this. And it's coming from so many different places, whether it's lying in the newspaper, going to local meetings, and then just spreading lies about solar panels being toxic. So can you talk about that and where this is all coming from? Yeah, I really stood out to us as we started digging into this and Jenna and I were looking into this story is really how the antagonism against Frazier solar seemed almost like a cacophony of anti solar sentiment. It seemed to really start in the Mount Vernon news, but it expanded from there. It essentially so disinformation and misinformation, it pushed really one sided coverage of solar as something that was questionable and not necessarily beneficial and could take away prime farmland, which is something that residents were concerned about because it will potentially change the way that parts of their community look. And so it really touched on that and really pushed that kind of home. But what we found in our reporting is that that was essentially the starting points that there were were actually other factors that play here, including a local anti solar group that popped up and created a meeting for residents to attend. And as we started digging into this group called knock smart development, we realized that it wasn't really a grassroots group like it claims. It actually was much more similarly connected to what we call astroturfing, which is a group that seems like it is locally, locally determined, but really actually takes money from outsiders. And so as we started looking at knock smart development, which held two different meetings over the course of a couple months to really bring people in and hear about how solar is that bad, we looked at who was funding them. These were not your kind of average meetings that are held in the gymnasium of a high school. This was held at a newly renovated space in downtown Mount Vernon. They brought in speakers that were climate denier speakers from out of state who sold their books at the meetings. And we found out that actually one of the largest donors to this group is a former head of the largest company and employer in town, which is the Ariel corporation, which manufactures natural gas compressors. And so this man, Tom Rasten is a Republican mega donor. And this is all according to records and sworn testimony. His father-in-law founded Ariel and until recently his wife led the company. And so there's so many players here. Can you talk about? I just think about what we lose when a small, very important paper like this folds and is now run by basically a group that is pushing out propaganda. And then luckily, you all have gone in to tell this story. But can you talk, Miranda, about just what it takes to uncover a story like this? And what we all lose when these small town papers shut down, which is happening just on a regular basis in this country? Well, I will start with just, you know, what you lose as a reporter. I spoke to a lot of former reporters at the Mount Vernon News who lost their jobs. The day that Mount Vernon, that metric media took over, they moved everyone from being a full-time reporter to a contract role. They basically stripped them up their 401Ks, up their health care. And a lot of people had to quit on the spot because they couldn't afford to live that way. What ended up happening is that a lot of the articles that are now written for the Mount Vernon News are actually, by and large, AI generated by overseas reporters. There's not a single reporter based in Ohio who writes for the Mount Vernon News. We were able to determine. So not only is the paper losing its local identity, its local flair, but locals do not have any sort of connection to the reporters or organization that is writing about them. But yet, they are still receiving this paper. They are no longer getting obituaries on a timely basis. So they are no longer getting that community news, which, again, helps with the trustworthiness of you trusting the paper because they don't really know who's running it and who's writing those articles and where they're coming from. And I think outside of the reporters who lost their jobs and the community no longer having that interconnection with the paper, which is so important when it comes to trust in data, these stories are incredibly misleading. They are one-sided takes on stories. I think what really differentiates the difference between news stories and public relations is that news stories are supposed to have both sides. You quote both sides of the story. You always go for comments. You always make sure that people are aware of the stories coming out. You know who's writing them. They have bylines. There's transparency. That's the ultimate goal with journalistic reporting. And that's not what's happening here at the Mount Vernon News. And these articles are kind of stoking this flame of animosity against solar. And people don't really know what to make of it. They don't know where to go to understand the facts from fiction because that paper that would do that no longer exists in their community. I actually spoke to a woman who lives in town and she said that solar had become such a hot button topic, that it was almost avoided like politics at the kitchen table. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing someone say solar. And she had a note that you would have 15 people say the word solar and you'd look around and there would actually only be five people in the room. I mean it was just you couldn't go anywhere without hearing about it and became so overwhelming. But no one really knew why. Because it just was not really that big of an issue until the paper started making it one. Does metric media make any money from this? Or are they just acting as a major major ad for oil and gas? We know that metric media does take out ad revenue. So people do still buy advertisements with the website with Mount Vernon News and across other websites that metric media owns. They own nearly 1200 websites across the country. We also know that metric media has a nonprofit arm that does take millions of dollars in donations. In fact, according to the most recent tax data that we can find, which is unfortunately two years delayed, it took $2 million from donor's trust, which again is kind of that described as the Coke ATM, where money is donated and the kind of doled out to groups that it supports. And so we do know that the founders make money off of this. But it's really hard to know exactly who is directly paying for this because by and large, they don't have to they don't have to release that data. And final thoughts from you, Jennifer, I mean, obviously, this is not just Ohio. This is happening across the country. In your piece, we learned that in Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro solar politician in Alabama, the state's largest monopoly electric company purchased an historic black newspaper, then didn't write about solar power bills here in California and our backyard, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered and it does not cover itself critically. Can you just talk about in our remaining minute? What this means? And do you think that we're so glad that outlets like ProPublica exist? But it takes so much work to expose this. So what does this mean for the future of really learning about what's happening in your own backyard? If you live in a place that does not have an independent local paper or a local media outlet. And that's the point, really. It's like the people who are living in these communities that don't have access to well reported transparent news, they're the ones who are suffering. And Mount Vernon is a great example of this. You have a community who feels like something is wrong, has recognized that their newspaper has changed. They can't get obits until after people are buried. So they're recognizing that the quality has changed. But it takes a whole lot of work to understand that someone is making those decisions and trying to shape the very tone and tenor of what's in the newspaper. And that's really, really tough. It really does require some deeply investigated journalism to be transparent about who is making the news that you're consuming. Jennifer Smith Richards is a reporter for ProPublica. Miranda Green is an investigative journalist and director of investigations at Floodlight News. Floodlight, ProPublica and the Toast Center for Digital Journalism worked on this very important investigation called "Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar" in one Ohio County, the hometown newspaper is helping. Jennifer and Miranda, thanks to you and your team for bringing us this important investigation. And thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks to Malihay Razazan for producing today's show. Thanks to Kevin Vance for engineering our show. And thank you for joining us. I'm Rosanna Aguilar. It's your call. Bye. [Music]
An investigation by ProPublica, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and Floodlight details how fuel interests have been working to kill a solar project in Ohio.