From a Bloomberg opinion column,
Minnesota Is Becoming the Land of 10,000 Frauds.
I would update the headline with “has become.” The column was written by Patricia Lopez, formerly of the Minnesota Star Tribune. File this effort under the label, “Better late than never.”
Lopez writes,
In a state that once prided itself on clean government, fraud allegations have been turning up in an array of nonprofits the state depends on to carry out programs related to housing, nutrition assistance, child care and more. The total cost to taxpayers could exceed $1 billion, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota.
There isn’t a single word in the above paragraph that couldn’t have been written three years ago. Lopez recounts some of the intervening scandals and then poses the question,
How did we get here? Lax oversight and, perhaps, a complex web of too-close relationships between regulators and those they oversee.
“We’ve been resting on our laurels for 40 years on how good and clean our government is,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at St. Paul’s Hamline University.
Prof. Schultz is correct. I’ve been saying the same thing going back more than three years. But three years ago publishing such statements was considered to be racist slander. What’s changed? Prof. Schultz notes,
“The other problem is probably a consequence of one-party rule,” Schultz told me. Democrats have filled nearly every top statewide elected office for over a decade.
Again, he is correct. But some of the blame must also be placed on Ms. Lopez and her former employer, the Star Tribune. All of the stories she mentions have been around for at least a decade, going back to the child care scandal noted above. But the Star Tribune buried these stories because they reflected badly on the “one-party rule” that she and the other editors favored.
It fell to outlets like the New York Post and the U.K. Daily Mail to bring these scandals to public attention back in Minnesota. Local news consumers weren’t getting this information from local legacy media.
David Burge wrote back in 2013,
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
Lopez is justified in her concern that popular support for the state’s generous welfare programs has dropped as the fraud stories become more widely known.
As long as Lopez and other local media outlets could keep the story buried, everything was fine. She gives away the game, writing,
Governor Tim Walz (D) faces new headwinds in his reelection bid; and Republicans in DC can continue to slash public funding by claiming, not without cause, that such programs are rife with waste, fraud and abuse.
The coverup is always worse than the crime. To quote the French Duke,
It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.
An earlier version of this post appeared at AmericanExperiment.Org.
