Home Miami TV More on WFOR’s Medicare Collaboration With 60 Minutes

More on WFOR’s Medicare Collaboration With 60 Minutes

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Some of you had a problem with my post about WFOR teaming up with ’60 Minutes’ for the Medicare investigation saying that it wasn’t a big deal because all WFOR did was CBS’ dirty work.

Yesterday Al Tompkins from PoynterOnline posted an email interview with WFOR reporter Stephen Stock about what they found during the investigation and also asked him how the WFOR team came to be involved with it.

At the Investigative Reporters and Editors convention in Baltimore last June, investigative producer Ira Rosen, who works at “60 Minutes,” asked if I would be interested. A few months earlier, Jay Weaver at The Miami Herald had just done a great series on Medicare fraud and I was eager to advance the story or shed further light on it.

When “60 Minutes” came to town, we met with them and shared various ideas and resources. They shot their own interviews and B-roll, but asked us to commit resources to undercover visits to clinics, DMEs and providores.

Working with “60 Minutes” was a challenge. They have their own culture and expectations and they don’t share easily. Their long, successful history doesn’t contain many cooperative projects with local TV news operations. However, they did enable us to meet FBI sources we wouldn’t have found without them. We met and were able to work with the FBI informant, which wouldn’t have happened without them. They opened doors and gave insight and ideas that enabled us to be successful. And we contributed by successfully getting undercover video of an office worker offering money both for a list and to a “patient” to use her Medicare number. “60 Minutes” chose not to use the video and framed the story otherwise, but we contributed nonetheless.

Check out the whole interview here

12 COMMENTS

  1. props to Stock for giving the Herald their due. i was thinking the same thing, i read most of the stories in the paper. good job Stephen, give credit where credit is due.

  2. At the end of the day WFOR still sucks and will always suck as long as that moronic management team remains in place.

  3. And people like you Nick and especially Diego whose lips are so pressed up WSVN’s asses won’t get it. Not every station has to play monkey see monkey do with WSVN. It worked initially with us and then people saw for who we are, A WANNABE CLONE OF THEM. So keep yappin’ you two. You just showed how ignorant you are!

    Glad to see WFOR trying to make a name by NOT being SVN!

  4. Former FOR Employee,

    You washed up HACK. Go back to workin at that station nobody is watchin or could care if it vanished from the airwaves tomorrow. I will take WSVN ‘s trash anyday over that garbage your so called crappy station puts out anyday. As for me and Nick being up someones rear end you would know about that wouldnt’ you? I hear Les Moonves has a special spot for you in between his cheeks.

  5. You mean, you dont think Diego knows what hes talking about when he says Bekly and Lynn (could use another facelift) Martinez are great anchor women? You mean you do not like your anchorwomen making childish faces when they do the news? Maybe,they really arent making faces, its just the facelift that Lynn has had.

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