The Washington Examiner headline had me doing a double-take: “North Carolina town rejects solar farm, fears it will deplete sun’s energy.”

Seriously?

So I read the report, which inauspiciously begins with correspondent Don Hawkins getting wrong the name of the James Taylor song to which he links – it’s “Carolina in My Mind,” not on. In a strained string of Taylor oeuvre references, Mr. Hawkins concludes that an entire community – condescendingly called “the good people of Woodland, North Carolina” – may be impaired from gulping too much moonshine. What makes him think so? Their town council had the temerity to deny a zoning permit for a solar farm because, Hawkins says, “residents” voiced “fears” that the rows upon rows of solar panels could “suck up all the energy from the sun,” among other horrors.


Hawkins’ source for “this underreported scientific fact” that, he snarks, “portend[s] environmental cataclysm for the rest of the world,” is the Huffington Post. So I dutifully went there and found the piece by Lee Moran, the HuffPo Trends Editor. It is topped by a similarly sneering headline, “Solar Farm Rejected Amid Fears It Will ‘Suck Up the Sun’s Energy.’”

It it turns out, though, that there are not “Fears,” plural. The claim was made by a single person, one Bobby Mann. He evidently blurted it out during a town council meeting at which other residents voiced quite reasonable concerns about whether it was prudent to re-desginate agricultural land to be used for manufacturing purposes, and whether the proposed zoning change would negatively affect the values of their homes.



As in any group of people – like, say, a random collection of well educated journalists stationed safely north of the Mason-Dixon line, one of whose members suspects a missing jetliner has been swallowed up by a black hole – some members of the Woodland community expressed fears that, to the better informed, were not well grounded.

Notwithstanding Hawkins’ sermonizing about the “global consensus that solar power is one of the cleanest and most renewable alternatives to oil and coal,” the Woodland town council meeting appears to have featured a group of ordinary Americans, civically engaged, who reasonably decided not to re-zone to permit a solar farm. But of course, reporting it that way would deprive the media of the opportunity to portray an entire community as a collection of yahoos.

It is not news any more. It is just narrative, written for the entertainment of like-minded narrators. That’s why increasing numbers of turned off Americans no longer turn it on.