Chapter 1: What are the allegations behind Minnesota’s massive fraud scandal?
The widening fraud scandal in Minnesota is now alleged to involve as much as $9 billion in taxpayer money, and it's begun to spark significant political fallout.
That includes the announcement this week from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that he's dropped out of his race for reelection.
Every minute that I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can't spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who want to prey on our differences.
Despite the magnitude of the scandal, the legacy media has attempted to downplay it and shift the blame to the people exposing it, including independent journalists.
In this episode, we speak to an analyst at the Media Research Center about the role bias has played in the legacy media's coverage of the sprawling scandal. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
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Chapter 2: How has the legacy media responded to the Minnesota fraud scandal?
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Joining us now to discuss how the media has covered the widespread fraud scandal in Minnesota is MRC Senior Research Analyst Bill D'Agostino. Bill, thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So we have this major scandal in Minnesota dealing with massive social services fraud. Legacy Media appears to have largely avoided this story, at least initially. Then there's some blame shifting that's been going on since the response has become sort of overwhelming and they have to cover this. Your team has crunched the numbers. Can you break down the coverage highlights of CBS, NBC, and ABC?
Yeah, when we look at the broadcast networks, we almost always focus mostly on the evening newscasts because those are the most watched television shows, or news shows at least, in the country. And remarkably, ABC, which often actually tops the list of those three, has been almost entirely absent from this story.
So there was one mention of it on December 3rd, right around when the story was breaking, that they buried in the middle of a report about how ICE is sowing fear in the Somali community. So that was a 25-second mention. Since then, they've included one more mention of it, not even really discussing any of the details at all, just 10-second mentions. So their total coverage for the last
I'd say, yeah, last week plus all of December is 35 seconds. It's just incredible. NBC primarily ignored the story up until Nick Shirley started reporting on it. And since then, they've sort of shifted from the bias by omission track to kind of playing defense for it. So instead, they're trying to go on the offense against Shirley's investigation.
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Chapter 3: What role has bias played in the media coverage of the scandal?
We've seen a decent amount of them... touting Minnesota officials saying, oh, well, you know, we've investigated and we haven't found anything, which is, it's an entertaining kind of standard of proof for a network that back during the whole Me Too craze investigated itself and also found no evidence of Ron doing. Yeah, so CBS really was where the lion's share of the coverage was.
And they actually have been pretty reliable about this. They've been on the story basically since it started. They were the only network that did multiple full-length reports on it before Nick Shirley's investigation came out. So full length would be about 90 seconds or more for a broadcast network. And they're up to about 13 to 14 minutes now as of last night.
Well, it's certainly substantially more.
Is that, in fact, good? It's hard to really contextualize broadcast network time as opposed to, say, like CNN or MSNBC, where you've got like a 24-hour news cycle. But 13 minutes is actually, that's quite a decent chunk, right?
Because if you think about the evening newscast, they're a 30-minute block, but really only about 18 minutes of that is news, and you've got like 12, 11 minutes of commercials. So over a month and then an additional week, I would give— decent amount of credit for almost getting up to 15 minutes there.
Does this seem like a shift from CBS before Barry Weiss came on board as editor-in-chief?
Yes and no. I mean, it's definitely evidence of some of her influence. But there has been a little bit of the remaining holdover from the previous, I guess, administration, you could call it, at CBS. Because a lot of the time before Tony DeCoppo came in and was the anchor…
A lot of the time, the introduction to some of the reports on this fraud scandal were completely different from the actual report itself. So when you had, for example, co-host John Dickerson introducing it, he would introduce it in the same way that, say, NBC or ABC might have, which is to say – It's all about Trump is terrorizing the Somali community with fraud.
He said these awful comments about Somalians. Anyway, here's our reporter. And then the report begins with the actual fraud scandal as opposed to Trump's comments about Somalians. So there's sort of an imbalance of seriousness between the – the former co-hosts, and the actual reporting that's being done.
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Chapter 4: How did CBS, NBC, and ABC differ in their coverage of the fraud allegations?
CBS, I would say, though, obviously is not a part of that general trend in this case. And hopefully that's evidence that CBS is actually improving a decent amount. Although I'm going to hold my judgment on that until we've given both Barry Weiss and Tony DeCoppo a little bit more time to cook.
Meanwhile, we have walls pulling out of the race. We'll see how the media continues to cover even the political races in Minnesota if the fraud scandal inevitably comes up or if they figure out ways to bury that from their coverage. Bill, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
That was Bill D'Agostino, Senior Research Analyst at the Media Research Center, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.