Maine TV News Slams Competitor

In the news business if you get beat by the competition there are three choices.

Swear and go back to bed, follow up with your own reporting, or try to debase the originating purveyor.

When The Maine Wire broke a statewide TB outbreak blockbuster, News Center Maine chose option No. 3.

Steve Robinson, editor-in-chief of The Maine Wire, went live, so to speak, once he got wind of an inside memo alerting to a tuberculosis outbreak.

WCSH, however, couldn't handle the truth so it chose the third option - going after Robinson.

“News Center Maine has apparently run a hit piece on me without including my responses to their emails, so here's the response,” Robinson tweeted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Maine CDC is denying a TB outbreak at the migrant shelter in Portland,” he added. “Here's the email sent to primary care physicians in Maine saying there's a TB outbreak in Portland.”

Robinson attached a screen grab of the memo as proof of his exclusive report:

“Also,” he noted in a second X post, “the Maine CDC's website confirms 28 cases of TB in Maine this year, well above the five-year median, and perfectly in line with our report this spring that a shelter worker was hospitalized with TB and now 21 cases are being mentioned in an email to physicians.”

Meanwhile, the TV folks who got scooped decided to cover their loss by reporting that they failed to confirm the outbreak.

Robinson became the fall guy when the TV station suggested that he was putting out fake news.

It didn't take long for News Center to decide that Robinson was right after all.

“The actual story here should be: Dora Mills and Maine CDC are saying there’s no TB outbreak, but a non-public memo circulated among primary care physicians says there is a TB outbreak,” Robinson said.

“So is there a miscommunication or is someone lying?”

Robinson also noted who Gov. Janet Mills trotted out to deny the TB outbreak: her own sister, physician Dora Mills.

He wondered: could it be that the Mills sisters were trying to downplay the news “because it originated at a migrant shelter?”

“This would fit the pattern earlier this year of Team Mills refusing to acknowledge a record outbreak of HIV/Hep-C because it stemmed from a needle exchange clinic they supported with taxpayer dollars,” Robinson noted.