Nick Shirley Jolted Minnesota Politics. But Is He Really ‘Independent’?
Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old self-described “independent journalist,” garnered national attention last month when he claimed to have uncovered $110 million in alleged fraud schemes in Minnesota’s day care centers.
His 42-minute viral video turned up the heat on Gov. Tim Walz, who dropped his reelection bid Monday, and helped spur a large-scale federal response, with the Trump administration freezing billions in social services funding to Minnesota and four other blue states.
But unlike traditional journalists, who typically refrain from celebrating the political fallout from their work, Shirley seemed to revel in it. “I ENDED TIM WALZ,” he declared on X, one of a flurry of recent posts mocking the governor and even suggesting he may have been involved in the murder last year of Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman.
While Shirley’s work has jolted Minnesota politics, and helped spark a national conversation about state funding for social services, his methods broke from traditional norms and standards. But it also opened a debate over what constitutes an independent journalist, with Shirley and his history as an influencer falling under scrutiny.
“I see my share of independent journalists on social media every day that they’re just, they’re co-opting the name,” said Kevin Z. Smith, an Ohio University professor and former president of the Society of Professional Journalists, and who now sits on its ethics committee. “They’re co-opting the name ‘journalist’ because it gives them credibility. At the same time, while they’re stealing that credibility, they’re also undermining the actual virtues and standards that journalists use in this business in order to report truthfully and accurately, fairly.”
Shirley’s man-on-the-street style was compelling, and ripe for sharing on social media. The video, in which he visited several government-funded, Somali-run day care centers to see if they housed children, was posted on Dec. 26 and quickly went viral, garnering more than 100 million views on X and more than 3.3 million views on YouTube.
But Shirley departed from how a traditional news reporter might approach the subject. A reporter would be expected to clearly and fully identify themselves, and the outlet or program they represent, as well as anyone accompanying them on the assignment, such as the man he only identified in the video as “David.” And a traditional reporter, if, say, prevented from entering a day care center, would be expected to do significant follow-up before suggesting fraud is at play. At a mainstream news outlet, fraud allegations would surely undergo extensive vetting by editors or producers before airing publicly.
“Shirley has not been particularly transparent about where his political affiliations may lie,” Jane Kirtley, a media ethics and law professor at the University of Minnesota, told TheWrap.
Catching fire
Nevertheless, Shirley’s claims were quickly amplified by the Trump administration and prominent figures on the right. FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency had deployed additional resources into combating fraud in the state, while Vice President JD Vance suggested Shirley deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Shirley has since appeared on conservative programs, like Donald Trump Jr.’s show, “Triggered,” which described him as “what real journalism looks like.”
And last week, Shirley offered himself as a resource for the Trump administration.
“Dear Mr President,” he wrote in an X post on New Year’s Eve, tagging President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Patel. “How can I help?
Shirley has appeared aligned with the right for some time.
Reuters described Shirley as a “pro-Trump influencer” in 2024 in reporting how he recruited Hispanic day laborers at a Home Depot and paid them $20 to hold up signs in support of then-President Joe Biden. Shirley joined other content creators in October at a White House roundtable on antifa, and the following month, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, who has a history of selectively editing video to tell a specific story, named Shirley the “Citizen Journalist of the Year” at his “Citizen Journalist Gala” at Mar-a-Lago.
Meanwhile, since the video debuted, Shirley referred to the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people,” echoing Donald Trump, and labeled CNN the “Comical Commie Network” in response to a video of a CNN reporter questioning him about whether he believed his claims were accurate. He has also claimed the mainstream media has not looked into his allegations of fraud and has spent too much time investigating him.
Shirley did not respond to a request for comment.
Kirtley said that independent journalists do not need to suppress their political views, but they do have an ethical obligation to be clear about their motivations in pursuing a story.
“You need to be transparent about what your role is,” Kirtley said. “To hold yourself out as independent when in fact your reason for being is to carry water to advance the agenda of a particular administration — whether it’s conservative or liberal, it’s immaterial to me which one it is — I don’t think that that’s being an independent journalist.”
Smith classified Shirley in the same camp as Trump advocate Laura Loomer, who identifies herself as an “investigative journalist” on X. “They have found what they consider to be a successful practice of journalism that enables them to get the attention, to get the expansive audience that they need,” he said.
Traditional newsrooms in a bind
The New York Times, among others, have reported on fraud allegations in Minnesota. But Shirley’s video turbocharged the issue, and as his claims spread widely, mainstream news outlet were left trying to verify them.
“I think the traditional print media in particular have a lot of trouble countering” such viral videos, Kirtley said. “If you look at a paper like the Minnesota Star Tribune, which had been covering this issue for years in the broader sense, but because of their own journalistic ethical and legal practices, they would not have done the story in this way.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune found that, contrary to Shirley’s claims of no children at the 10 centers he visited, four of them did have children, while six others were either closed or did not open their doors to the paper. It also revealed that “David” is a political operative in the state linked to state House Republicans. (The paper’s editor did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
But the paper’s reach is dwarfed by Shirley’s. Shirley has 1.1 million X followers compared to the Star Tribune’s roughly 404,000, and he has 1.45 million YouTube subscribers compared to the paper’s 27,600 subscribers.
Kirtley told TheWrap that there would always be a place for ethical journalism because “there has to be some kind of baseline of what kind of evidence you need before you make assertions.” But, she said, traditional media has to do a better job of fighting back against agenda-driven narratives from both left-wing and right-wing actors.
“Getting the public to understand that not all information that is out there is created equal, that it’s not all subject to the same level of verification and vetting, and that, therefore, it behooves people to look for a variety of sources on any particular story, not simply those that advance the beliefs they already had,” Kirtley said.
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