Media in Maine Miss the Point

It seems we’re not alone in our disgust with the media. Down East magazine has also noticed that Maine’s establishment press prefers to demonize James O’Keefe rather than actually investigating the Medicaid fraud exposed in our latest report.

In his article “Maine Media Miss the Issue on Welfare Fraud,” Down East writer Al Diamon points out O’Keefe’s “valid contention that no news organization in Maine has made any serious effort to investigate the extent of welfare fraud in the state. Instead, whenever the issue comes up, reporters and editors tend to rely on old statistics that show such occurrences are rare.”

Further, Diamon says, “the source of those stats is DHHS itself, which has something of a vested interest in appearing competent. The department also has a long-standing reputation for being otherwise.” That, of course, is precisely what James O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been saying all along.

Not just in Maine, but across the country. The mainstream media has failed to adequately scrutinize allegations of and potential for Medicaid fraud, relying instead on excuses and statistics supplied by the very same government agencies they should be investigating. Such a cozy relationship has obviously worked out very well for overpaid “journalists,” but it does a great disservice to the taxpayers who are left to foot the bill. Not to mention those people that legitimately need assistance, but can’t get it due to the fraudulent misallocation of resources.

As Diamon says, “While too many Maine journalists were straining their arms patting themselves on the back, none was risking back strain by doing some serious digging.” Unfortunately, the nation’s newsrooms are full of strong backed reporters without the tools or the guts to do any “serious digging.”

That’s why Project Veritas was founded, and why the demand for our investigative work only continues to grow.