Transcript of How Legacy Media Covered and Missed 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 Walsh that he's dropped out of his race for re-election.

Every minute that I spend defending my own political interest would be a minute I can't spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who pray on our generosity and the cynics who want to pray 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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Joining us now to discuss how the media has covered the widespread fraud scandal in Minnesota is MRC Senior Research Analyst, Bill D'Agustino. Bill, thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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 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, we When we look at the broadcast networks, we almost always focus mostly on the evening newscast 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 third, 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 mention. So their total coverage for the last, I'd say, last week, plus all of December is 35 seconds.

It's just incredible.

Nbc primarily ignored the story up until Up until nick Shirley started reporting on it. And since then, they've shifted from the bias by omission track to playing defense for it. So instead, they're trying to go on the offense against Shirley's investigation. We've seen a decent amount of them touting Minnesota officials saying, Oh, well, we've investigated and we haven't found anything, which is an entertaining standard of proof for a network that back during the whole #metoo craze investigated it 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, CNN or MSNBC, where you've got 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 got 12, 11 minutes of commercials. So over a month and then an additional week, I would give a 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 DeCopel 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 as opposed to Trump's comments about Somalians. So there's an imbalance of seriousness between the former co-hosts and the actual reporting that's being done. And I would definitely attribute some of the investigative work that's being done to Barry Weiss' influence, because as far as I know, they are the only network of the three that actually has somebody on the ground there digging into this.

Even the full-length stuff that NBC has run on this has basically just been reheated news from other sources.

Really remarkable, considering that the allegations here are that $9 billion in fraud has been carried out in the state. You would think these networks would be very interested in this. So I wanted to talk about the role of nick Shirley. You mentioned him. Nbc waited to cover this story until Shirley's exposé went viral, effectively. How common is it to see this delayed response from these networks?

That's incredibly common. Basically, it's a turning point where they go from, We think we can keep cover on a lid on this story to, Okay, now our hand is being forced. We have to get out in front of it. And that's very much the thinking, I think, that went on at NBC based on the way that they've covered it since his report came out. Because after his video came out, basically all of their coverage has been centered around the allegations that he makes and some of the conclusions that he jumps to. Initially, they were fairly, I wouldn't say credulous, but just regurgitating everything that he found. Since then, anytime they've covered it since when he first put his video up, they've taken a lot more of the fight to him, and they're essentially running, I would say, interference for the Somalians that he's accusing in that video.

We also saw that with CNN. Can you speak to their coverage of this? They seem like they've been particularly hostile towards Shirley. Yes.

I think the most incredible report of all of 2025 managed to come out on New Year's Eve somehow. That was CNN sent a reporter to confront nick Shirley in person, not confront any of the daycares in person, but confront him, grill him on how he knows what he knows, why he's making these allegations in the first place, basically getting to, well, what's your problem? Why even dig into this? Why are you bothering? And of course, the obvious answer is because people like the CNN reporter are not looking into it. But then they cut to the reporter actually calling some of these daycares. Six of the seven that she called did not pick up. The one that does, they have an exchange that goes, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here, but something along the lines of, Hi, this is CNN. Are you doing fraud? No, we're not. Okay, thank you. So very solid investigative work from CNN, as always.

A really hard hitting. We've come to expect no less from them. Stepping back a little bit here, this entire episode, the coverage of the scandal, how does it fit into MRC's broader findings about media bias, particularly in the Trump era?

It's difficult to talk about this as freely as I would like to without making some allegation that I can't back up. But I very much see this personally as a fraud for Democrats, based on the fact that it is a Democratic administration running this. And there is evidence that is coming out now that at least looks like there is some degree of willful blindness, basically, deliberately turning the other cheek on the part of the Walsh administration in Minnesota. And so in that context, I would argue that this is basically part and parcel of how we tend to see the broadcast networks cover this thing. It starts out as basically this is something that Trump is upset about, this is something that Conservatives are upset about, so we'll mention it a little bit, but always frame it in that context. And then when we're forced to go further, start actually attacking the accusations themselves or the scandal itself. 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 DeCopel 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 the Media Research Center. And this has been a weekend edition of MorningWire.