All Eyes On Minnesota
The Scandal In Minnesota Isn’t Just Alleged Fraud. It’s That Legacy Media Ignored It.
At 2:57 p.m. on December 26, a 23-year-old American independent journalist named Nick Shirley uploaded a 42-minute video documenting widespread alleged fraud in Minnesota, centred around daycare centres and healthcare institutions tied to the state’s Somali community.
Nick and his crew reportedly uncovered over $110 million in alleged fraud in a single day of on-the-ground investigation.
The total fraud in Minnesota could meanwhile top $9 billion.
The video exploded.
Within hours, Shirley’s video reached over 110 million views on X, and was shared by Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and many other prominent individuals.
Most commentary on Shirley’s reporting has focused on the obvious angles: immigration and the abuse of public funds.
However, there is another angle that must be discussed.
Shirley did not just expose widespread alleged fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community.
He also exposed America’s legacy media.
Where Was The Legacy Media???
Shirley worked alongside a Minneapolis local named David, who has been documenting alleged fraud for years. The activity was not hidden. The locations were known.
And yet, there was virtually no sustained coverage from major Minnesota legacy media outlets, and even less from national legacy media. This is despite the fact that the story did not require classified documents or secret sources. It required only curiosity, time, and a willingness to engage with a sensitive subject.
The legacy media had all the resources. America’s largest media organizations command billions of dollars in combined operating budgets and employ thousands of journalists.
Yet they seemingly used none of them to cover this story.
What did they choose to cover instead?
Well, 60 Minutes, CBS’s once-revered prime-time program, has devoted its resources to cheering Germany’s censorship laws and targeting parents concerned about gender ideology in schools.
Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer dollars are allegedly being siphoned off in plain sight in Minnesota, with possibly billions more in other states, with some of the funds going to terrorist organization Al-Shabaab.
This is not incompetence on the part of America’s legacy media. It is deliberate avoidance.
Luxury Social Justice Journalism
There are two key reasons America’s legacy media chose not to pursue this story.
The first is what can best be described as a luxury mindset.
Modern American journalism, especially at elite national outlets, is no longer rooted in the lives of ordinary people. It has become the domain of a narrow, privileged elite.
To work at institutions like The New York Times or CNN today often requires elite educational credentials, social connections, and family support capable of subsidizing life in prohibitively expensive cities on small entry-level salaries. AKA you need to be a nepo baby.
This has transformed journalism from a blue-collar trade into an elite cultural occupation.
Newsrooms that once reflected a broad cross-section of society have become socially and economically homogeneous. Journalists overwhelmingly share elite backgrounds, woke political assumptions, and progressive cultural values. As a result, they increasingly see the world not as most people do.
This shift is powerfully diagnosed in the book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon, which I strongly recommend everyone read.
Ungar-Sargon writes, “Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity.”
For these elites, fraud linked to the Minnesota Somali community is just not interesting.
The second reason legacy media avoided this story is woke fear.
Modern newsrooms increasingly operate through an intersectional framework, filtering events through leftist academic categories of power, oppression, and identity.
Within this worldview, any story that risks portraying a minority group in a negative light must be killed in the name of anti-racism.
The calculation is simple: if a story could be labeled racist, it is safer not to report it at all.
In addition to helping explain the media blackout on the Minnesota Somali fraud scandal, this helps explain why British legacy media avoided reporting on the UK Pakistani grooming-gang scandals for years and why, in Canada, major outlets were silent following reports last year of Middle Eastern men allegedly attacking a lesbian couple in Halifax.
In each case, the overriding concern was not truth or public interest. It was identity politics, with journalists fearing being accused of racism more than fearing failing their audience.
But when powerful media institutions systematically refuse to report wrongdoing by certain groups, there are consequences. It creates the perception of a two-tiered society, where some actors are shielded from scrutiny while others are relentlessly exposed.
In trying to avoid racial conflict, woke legacy media ends up fuelling it.
The Legacy Media Hates Nick Shirley
The truth is that many legacy media journalists hate people like Nick Shirley.
While they are currently refusing to credit or seriously engage with his reporting, you can be certain that some are working overtime to dig into his past in search of disqualifying material.
Shirley is 23. He did not attend journalism school. He did not climb a newsroom ladder. He did not wait for editorial approval. After high school, he did a two-year Mormon mission, and returned to build one of the most impressive independent reporting operations.
In roughly two years, he amassed millions of views and followers.
Instead of writing from a climate-controlled legacy media office, he went outside. He filmed. He spoke to people. And he reported what he saw.
He did all of this while those who chose to work in legacy media spent tens of thousands of dollars on expensive journalism degrees, followed by years of grunt work climbing an increasingly irrelevant media hierarchy.
Legacy media journalists resent that, today, the internet allows regular people to surpass them.
When I started my own journalism career as a young independent journalist, I was reporting from the Parliamentary Press Gallery for True North, often sitting alongside senior legacy media journalists. Many of these people would not speak to me or pretend I did not exist.
To be fair, some were very kind and remain friends of mine today. Some even subscribe to this Substack. But the majority did not treat me that way.
Yes, there were ideological differences. I was a conservative journalist, and that certainly played a role. But it went beyond politics.
There was a clear resentment toward the fact that I was, at the time, a 19-year-old sitting next to them, receiving the same access and asking party leaders and government ministers questions at press conferences. I am not just speculating. I know from direct conversations that this resentment existed among some of the most senior figures in Canadian media.
But the hostility toward independent journalists is not about standards. It is about loss of control.
Legacy media no longer controls distribution, audience trust, or the definition of “serious journalism.” They are no longer the gatekeepers.
A single individual with a phone, time, and courage can now outperform entire newsrooms.
Journalism has been democratized.
And many in the legacy media hate this.
My Message To Aspiring Journalists
In legacy media, young journalists are told to wait. To write simple copy. To transcribe, edit, and produce, but never lead. They are often underpaid (and over-credentialed).
Meanwhile, prestige assignments go to older reporters with less time, less hunger, and often less willingness to challenge institutional norms.
Independent journalists do not have to tolerate that system. Nick Shirley never entered it. And by succeeding outside it, he exposed it.
If you want to be a journalist today, do not go to journalism school, and do not rely on legacy media for permission. These institutions are past their peak. They are structurally broken, ideologically captured, and culturally disconnected from the public they claim to serve.
Rather than be a disposable cog in a billionaire’s dying media empire, earning a bleak $50,000 a year while carrying water for corporate or political interests, young journalists can now own their work, own their audience, and earn six-figure incomes while making a huge impact.
Long live independent journalism!!!