You knew this would happen. An independent journalist scoops the legacy media, and they go after him. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Nick Shirley has made CNNCBSABCNBCNYT and all of the other leftist media look bad, and now they will try to make sure he pays.
Our own Eric Florack captured the essence of what Shirley accomplished just a few days ago:
This is most likely the single biggest story ever covered by an independent journalist. In one video alone, Nick Shirley has exposed over $100 million in fraud. I suspect he's merely scratched the surface on the story.
Keep in mind, this is right in the backyard of the big paper in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Star Tribune, a paper with far more in the way of resources to lean on than Mr. Shirley could ever hope to field. They can’t be bothered. Or perhaps they're shielding us from something. As you can imagine (and I suspect some viewers can see) the video has had over 100 million views so far. You can imagine why. Nobody, including the Tribune, is covering the story well enough.
Eric is right. The legacy media couldn’t be bothered, that is, until Shirley’s discoveries spurred on more investigations in Minnesota and elsewhere, and a pattern has emerged. There is a ton of corruption in the Somali-American communities, and we’re paying for it, as PJ Media's Victoria Taft revealed:
In the state of Washington, one internet sleuth began going through the grants and found 539 Somali daycare centers. Some of these centers are in people's homes. Many of these taxpayer-subsidized centers do not list an address.
So, how does the legacy media respond to all of this? Does it wake up and start covering the alleged fraud and corruption, or does it go after the journalistic whistleblower?
Actually, those were just rhetorical questions. I know you know what they did.
Here’s CNN confronting not the alleged scammers, but Shirley himself.
Rather than applauding @nickshirleyy for investigating the Minneapolis daycare fraud, @CNN released this hit piece on him.
— ROB GARGUILO (@RobbShowTV) December 31, 2025
They label Nick a MAGA YouTuber, attempt to discredit him, and when they "investigate" his claims, the reporter just calls a few daycares and takes their… pic.twitter.com/irBeREEudu
Here’s another CNN segment featuring a panel discussion meltdown over this.
🚨🇺🇸 CNN PANEL MELTS DOWN OVER NICK SHIRLEY'S VIRAL FRAUD INVESTIGATION: "YOU CAN'T JUST SHOW UP AND START ASKING QUESTIONS"
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) December 31, 2025
They're not mad about fraud.
They're mad they got scooped.
A CNN panel unloaded on Nick Shirley's Minnesota daycare investigation, dismissing him as a… https://t.co/fbN82ftLuv pic.twitter.com/WNxctjlXAl
One of the legacy media outlets conservatives have been watching closely to detect any possible change has been CBS News ever since Bari Weiss took over. To be sure, if she wants to reform the leftist culture at the news organization, she has a ton of work to do. But the story of corruption in Minnesota alone is a big one and immediately manageable, if she wants to effect change and send a message that there’s a new boss in town, as VodkaPundit wrote. But instead, we get this.
Hey @bariweiss why is your team taking the Minnesota government at its word? https://t.co/gnAnXXippT
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) December 30, 2025
Any time someone on the right catches a leftist or a leftist ally with his or her hand in the cookie jar, you can count on what we all know is the standard script: First, it’s not happening; second, it is happening, but it’s rare; third, OK, it is happening more broadly, but it’s good for you; and fourth, not only is it happening, but I can’t believe you aren’t celebrating it!
Since the leftist media are starting to realize they can’t ignore this story, and it won’t go away on its own, Shirley has forced them to pay attention to it. They don’t like that. And there’s no way they’re going to join the chorus of media exposing actual fraud and abuse at the expense of taxpayers. So you can expect that four-part narrative cycle to commence as we speak.
Related: Minnesota Leaders Tripping Over Themselves in Failed Effort to Dismiss Day Care Fraud
The four-part narrative cycle is relatively new. You may not remember this, or even if you do, you may not have been aware of how the media used to handle explosive allegations against those it typically sides with.
Back in 2007–08, John Edwards was a major Democratic contender in the race for the presidency that Barack Obama ultimately won. Edwards had already been the 2004 Democrat nominee for vice president. Cynically, the fact that as he ran, his campaign played up the fact that his wife was battling cancer at the time was improving his odds of winning his party’s nomination.
What the public did not know at first was that Edwards was having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a filmmaker his campaign had hired. The affair started in 2006, and by 2007, Hunter was pregnant. Edwards denied everything.
This was before social media and the kind of internet mob we have today, and so the job of ferreting out scandalous stories like this one fell on the old-fashioned newspaper tabloids.
They would do what the mainstream media would not. They would run stories about UFO sightings and Bigfoot, but they would also run scandalous stories that were at least partly, if not entirely, true.
The typical process at that time was that the mainstream media would allow itself to be scooped on certain stories, because it didn’t want to burn bridges with powerful people it might need later. Edwards was one of those people. If he survived this scandal and became president, the last thing the New York Times or CBS wanted would be to lose access to the White House.
And so, the old guard allowed the National Enquirer to investigate and break the story, even though a few reporters on the campaign trail had already sensed something was up between Edwards and Hunter.
The Enquirer broke the story, and it gained traction. After the story itself was mishandled by the campaign and it appeared Edwards was vulnerable, the mainstream media then decided to cover it.
What was different about the news media then, as opposed to now, is that then the mainstream media could be shamed into doing its job, and back then, it buried Edwards and his political career.
Today, the legacy media takes a different approach when it’s shamed into paying attention to the kind of story it would rather hide. Instead of allowing the pressure to force it to do actual journalism, it attacks the muckrakers. In this case, Nick Shirley.
The legacy media is far more than biased or left-leaning. It’s a weaponized force for the left that can easily be mobilized and leveraged against anyone who threatens the leftist status quo. That’s exactly what’s happening here.
The long knives are out for Nick Shirley, and he’s going to need the entire conservative movement and some friends in the Trump administration to ensure that his initial work has not been in vain, and that, for once, the legacy media has to actually start reporting the actual truth, no matter how much it does not want to.
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