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Notes -
It looks like the recent expose on child care center fraud has led to actual action in response: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/30/hhs-freezes-childcare-payments-minnesota/87965467007/
My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media) but I'd like to consider alternative explanations so I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the failures of traditional journalism here and/or the decision by HHS to cut off funding generally.
Additionally, given that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense are the lion's share of the federal budget, and much of the recent fraud has been Medicare/Medicaid fraud to the tune of billions, how much will this affect attempts at welfare reform? From both sides, both the people pushing UBI and the people trying to eliminate or reduce welfare generally.
Wouldn't one business-related explanation be that local reporting in legacy media is practically dead already?
This was always one of the arguments of what would happen as the internet killed and absorbed more and more of legacy media over the last several decades. Fewer local papers means fewer local journalists. Fewer local journalists means fewer local scandals exposed.
Local journalism was never a perfect guarantee that every scandal would inevitably be exposed, but when there was a small fleet of local journalists supported by subscribers in every medium-sized town in America, I can believe it was far more likely for something like "childcare welfare fraud by Somali immigrants in Minnesota" to be looked into, once an interested local citizen sends the tip in.
I agree that this is probably at least part of it.
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Well, define defend. Opinion journalism is cheap. So it’s not really a budgetary concern to drop an op-ed endorsing this, that, them, it or anything. Even if cash strapped outfits offer the aforementioned, it isn’t a refutation of the impact the internet had in gutting all the things newspapers previously used to generate revenue that paid for actual reporting.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is now PE owned, has one-fifth the staff of even the (formerly Minneapolis, now) Minnesota Star Tribune, and in a small but memorably (to me) depressing occurrence, was using AP wire reports with Chicago datelines to cover the Chauvin trial.
I’ve not seen either paper call the videographer a racist. I’ve seen general defenses of not painting all Somalian immigrants with the same brush. And in Minnesota’s largest paper, a recent op-ed demanding that the video in question be taken seriously:
https://www.startribune.com/somali-community-minnesota-day-care-video/601554742
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