Who Are Independent Journalists?

My VIPs for this week are independent journalists who tell the stories that go unreported by mainstream news teams. I will discuss two independent journalists in this post, and I will use an article by Eva Terry titled “The rise of independent journalism – the risks and rewards” and published in the Deseret News. 

The day after Christmas last year, 24-year-old Nick Shirley posted a video about suspected fraud in Minnesota. In it, he and a man named Dave Hoch knocked the doors of tax-funded daycare centers, then attended a meeting about fraud at Minnesota’s State Capitol. At the conclusion of its 42 minutes, Shirley reported they’d uncovered more than $110 million in fraud.

The video lit a fire on social media. Within a week, it had been viewed 4 billion times across all platforms, Shirley said, including X, YouTube, Facebook and others.

Responding to the outrage, the Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation. On Jan. 5, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced he would not seek reelection. On Jan. 6, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services froze billions of dollars in federal funding to five states, including Minnesota.

In late May, the Justice Department leveled fraud charges against 15 people in Minnesota, alleging $90 million of fraud in Medicaid programs.

Shirley is not the only independent journalist to be discussed in this post. The next one is Andy Ngo who began while a student at Portland State University.

Andy Ngo didn’t set out to pioneer the field of independent journalism. In 201, he was an editor for Portland State University’s student newspaper, where he was studying as a graduate student. That April, he attended an interfaith panel titled “Unpacking Misconceptions,” and one attendee asked whether the Quran permitted the killing of non-Muslims.

Ngo recorded the student panelist’s response: he said non-Muslims could be killed or banished in a state governed by Quranic law. Ngo posted the video to Twitter without commentary. Then his editors called him into their office.

“I was accused by a student activist on campus of Islamophobia, and it escalated up to the editor in chief and the administration,” Ngo said in an interview with the Deseret News. “So I was fired.”

The student newspaper, PSU Vanguard, published a front-page story that Ngo had separated from the newspaper. In 2017 if someone searched Ngo’s name on Google, Vanguard’s article would popup, as would Ngo’s response piece published in the National Review, titled “Fired for Reporting the Truth.”

“So I felt at that time, very early on – this was before I any social media following – that my prospect of going into a mainstream journalism career were destroyed,” he said.

Around the same time, violent protests erupted in Portland in response to President Donald Turmp’s first inauguration, “So I started going out with my iPhone seven,” Ngo said.

“This was years before there was monetization, so it wasn’t like a business decision. I saw that there were certain gaps in what I was reading in print from legacy media, which I at that time had a lot of respect for, in regard to violence and political violence from Antifa and other militant left-wing groups. That truth was not being reflected in broadcast, local broadcast media or the legacy print media,” he said.

The absence of mainstream coverage “motivated me to continue to go out and record these videos,” he said.