🚨Dressing up in jeans, cowboy boots, a western shirt straight from Cavender’s and a belt with a Longhorn buckle does not qualify Norah O'Donnell to opine on the character of Red Oak or any other Texas city. • Last night’s @60Minutes piece on #datacenters in #Texas spent 13 minutes chasing “backlash” and gave local supporters almost no airtime. That’s not reporting. That’s a framing choice. • All duded up in her drugstore cowboy attire, New York City resident O’Donnell declared data centers “are going to change the character of this community.” That’s opinion, not fact. Across the country, data centers have kept small towns from hollowing out. • Ellendale, North Dakota: the mayor says the town was dying until a data center arrived. Now families stay, spouses open shops, and the place has a future. • Cedar Rapids, Iowa and rural Georgia: family construction firms grow, Main Street stays open, kids don’t have to leave. • On power prices, 60 Minutes said Northern Virginia rates “surged” because of data centers. They left out the rest: Virginia still sits below the national average. Studies show large, steady data-center load helps utilities spread fixed costs and can hold rates down. • Prices have risen most places because of inflation and policy, not because a warehouse full of servers showed up. • Water? Credit where due. CBS admitted golf courses use more than twice as much water as data centers. UT Austin found Texas data centers use less than 0.5% of the state’s water. Operators are moving to closed-loop, near-zero-evaporation designs. • Two-thirds of proposed sites are rural. That’s not an invasion of farmhouses. That’s tax base, jobs, and a reason for young people to stay. Sensational claims make good TV. Honest trade-offs require facts. Communities can weigh those facts without a network correspondent in rodeo costume telling them who they are. [Link to full analysis in the following post.]