Last week, the Republican speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives said that her caucus had worked with Shirley to point out day cares to visit, a claim that raises questions about whether Shirley really was just a YouTuber on an independent search for the truth or if he could have been acting on behalf of the Minnesota state G.O.P. (On X, Shirley insisted that this was “completely false,” adding, “I have no idea who this lady is.” Over the weekend, The Intercept published a piece pointing to evidence that the man called David in the video is David Hoch, whom The Intercept identified as a “political operative with connections to the Minnesota state House.”) A few days later, the Trump Administration paused federal payments to day cares around the country, a policy that will affect countless children and families. Was this a good-faith attempt by the government to root out fraud, which they learned about from Shirley? Or are Republicans simply using this moment to cut yet another federal spending program? After all, as Patel noted, the F.B.I. had been aware of fraud in Minnesota for years.
Journalism isn’t a patent office: you don’t get credit only for being first. And Shirley, for better or worse, has shone a giant spotlight on an ongoing story, which has led to the things that journalists often want out of their stories: more of the public was informed about a problem and the powers supposedly responsible were held to account. On Monday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has borne much of the public blame for failing to prevent fraud in the state, announced he would not be running for a third term, saying he needed to use his time “defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.” On X, Shirley wrote, “I ENDED TIM WALZ.”
Whether Minnesota had done enough to address that fraud can and should be a point of debate. I suppose it’s also worth asking if the story had garnered enough national attention, though I’m not sure why fraud in Minnesota would be headline news across the country. But what Shirley and his cheerleaders have suggested is that he uncovered this fraud on his own because liberals in the government and the media were covering it up. Musk spent the better part of two days reposting reactions to the video, some of them falsely claiming that nearly every prominent news organization—the Times, CNN, the Washington Post—had failed to report at all, prior to Shirley’s video, on the Minnesota fraud story. The implication was that the woke media wants to protect criminal immigrants and feckless liberal politicians, most notably Walz, who supposedly let all this take place. Musk, who owns X, wants to promote the belief that the truth can be found on social media, and that the practitioners of real journalism are allegedly independent amateurs, such as Shirley, who can ask questions without being cowed by the woke agenda.
Shirley’s video gained a lot of traction because it was promoted by some of the most powerful and followed accounts on social media—but it went mega-viral because of its form. It’s true that local and national news reported on fraud in Minnesota, but there’s nothing quite like watching a secret get revealed on video, especially if you believe that everyone is trying to suppress it. The reality is that traditional investigative journalism is a frequently boring and frustrating endeavor that takes a lot of time, money, and patience. A lot of effort is expended tracking down paperwork from public-records requests, or looking through LinkedIn profiles to find people who might have worked together, or knocking on the doors of potential sources. When the work is done and enters the world, there’s a decent chance that the reporting garners relatively little attention. Print-media outlets—at least the types of places that can still afford investigative desks—are often sclerotic, quasi-puritanical institutions that discourage their practitioners from too much self-promotion or marketing.
Television news has always had a different approach to investigative work, attempting to engineer dramatic confrontations between the person or institution under scrutiny and the intrepid reporter. Local news has dined out for decades on the spectacle of the journalist marching into the shady business and demanding why the frozen meat has been stored in a mop bucket or whatever. National networks, for their part, have produced news-magazine shows that specialize in filming similarly dramatic face-to-face encounters. (During three years as a television-news correspondent, I quickly learned that the point of everything I did was to make the person sitting across from me as uncomfortable as possible.)
