Why give up a good story?

A claim spawned by the Cliven Bundy standoff has been bouncing around the internet. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be false.

The theory was that U.S. Sen. Harry Reid was behind the federal effort to get organic rancher Bundy to stop using swaths of public land for grazing so that it could be used for a Chinese solar energy project promoted by Reid and his son Rory to enrich themselves.

Fostered online, the claim spread like a virus. It made it onto a few mainstream news sites—usually hedged with phrases like “Bundy's supporters believe.” But it was mostly spread on opinion sites, conservative news sites like World Net Daily and the Washington Times, or by opinion writers, including Brendan Trainor in this newspaper (“The battle of Bunkerville,” April 24). In common internet fashion, they tended to attribute it to each other. (Trainor attributed it to “news reports,” and his column included a link to a Fox News report.) One mainstream reporter checked out the claim—Karoun Demirjian of the Las Vegas Sun. In an April 17 report, she assembled an array of facts that discredited the China tale and another allegation involving a different solar project.

For one thing, she found that the China project site is near Laughlin. Bundy grazes his cattle around Bunkerville. The two communities are 114 miles apart or 177 miles by car. They are separated by the Las Vegas Valley and the cities of Las Vegas and Henderson, the largest and second largest cities in the state.

Snopes, the website that checks out rumors, has also rated the Reid/China claim “false.” A few websites that posted the story as fact without checking it have retracted, including Breitbart.com, but most have left it in place online.

On a different note, in one of his New Yorker “news” reports, comedian Andy Borowitz wrote, “Republican politicians blasted the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy on Thursday for making flagrantly racist remarks instead of employing the subtler racial code words the G.O.P. has been using for decades. ‘We Republicans have worked long and hard to develop insidious racial code words like ‘entitlement society' and ‘personal responsibility,'  said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).”