WGME: We Gank MaineWire’s Exclusives

“Now to a story only on 13.”

Those are the words that so effortlessly flowed out of anchor Aysia Reed’s lying lips as WGME/CBS 13 in Portland, Maine regurgitated a story the Maine Wire’s Steve Robinson and Jon Fetherston broke exclusively back in March.

Even before the Mills Administration was embarrassed into acknowledging that MaineCare fraud was not some made-up political attack, as Gov. Janet Mills had previously claimed, Robinson had blown the lid of Paradise Residential Service’s $25 million autism group home racket, while Fetherston photographed CEO Jocelyne Ininahazwe fleeing his questions in a shiny new Mercedes E-Series.

But WGME’s content thievery is even more disgraceful than merely re-reporting a sensational story without even a nods worth of credit to the actual journalists putting in the hard work.

Yesterday, the crack I-Team at Channel 13 ran a story on Paradise that involved them chasing down one of the exact same witnesses Fetherston had interviewed multiple times on camera — video that was released 20 days before WGME lied to their audience about an exclusive story.

The TV station’s story was shockingly lazy and the ethical equivalent of journalistic plagiarism.

The Aug. 31 story on staffing failures and neglect at Paradise Residential Services group homes is built around former client Aleister Blade: dozens of placements, staff parked on couches with phones, missed appointments, filthy conditions, and a company DHHS finally cut off after finding untrained workers and incomplete background checks.

Blade, and some of his housemates and associates, have spent countless hours talking to the Maine Wire about this nightmare over the last year. We were the only ones who would listen. And we’re the only ones with the willingness and the capability to investigate how much this human rights catastrophe is costing Maine taxpayers.

Now that the Mills Administration has produced a tepid blog post about the inhuman, filthy, and corrupt practices at Paradise’s autism group homes, WGME seems to have been granted permission to cover the topic. It’s enough to make you wonder what other stories they’re holding back on, perhaps waiting for the thumbs up from Democrat powerbrokers before it’s safe to report. But you wouldn’t after to wonder too hard what their next “exclusive” will be — just search through the Maine Wire’s archive from a few weeks ago.

The Maine Wire was on the scene of dozens of Medicaid fraud hotspots last December — almost all of those locations hosting providers now suspended by DHHS. Our reporters were knocking doors and asking questions in the snow and ice as local media sat in their cubicles waiting from emails from Mills’ stillborn U.S. Senate campaign / governor’s office.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, flew from Washington D.C. to meet Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston at the Paradise Residential Services office.

I repeat: Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, flew from Washington D.C. to meet Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston at the Paradise Residential Services office.

Did the local cupcake news readers cover that?

Nope.

But they did cover Gov. Mills denying fraud allegations and smearing the former cardiac surgeon as a “TV doctor” on the exact same day DHHS terminated Paradise’s MaineCare funding.

Media outlets prostituting themselves for viewers are nothing new, but presenting a Maine Wire initiative as your standalone local exclusive is grotesque, fraudulent and immoral—not unlike the home care scammers themselves.

By the time WGME aired their segment, Maine Wire reporters had spent significant time with Blade, first visiting him in his Paradise group home and interviewing about his dozens of residential care placements as he continued to move from home to home. We also explained in detail how Paradise and other providers were charging Maine taxpayers between $30,000 to $40,000 per month to provide “care” like Blade was receiving.

On Aug. 11, we filmed with him again at a Gorham home he invited them into, documenting the same human cost: a man failed by the system while staff sat, scrolled, and ignored taxpayer-funded work. Those interviews and videos were public months before WGME’s piece.

Maine Wire reporters interview Aleister Blade on June 25, 2026.

WGME’s story uses the same source, the same photos and videos of idle staff that Blade provided, the same DHHS findings, and the same owner statement from Jocelyne Ininahazwe. It does not mention the months of prior reporting, the FOAA work, the earlier visits, or the sustained conversations already on the record. This pattern is familiar. Independent outlets do the unglamorous work—FOAA requests, former employees, repeated conversations with residents willing to speak—while broadcast news waits for a clean package and a familiar face.

Then the dinosaur station airs it without credit and treats the audience as if the facts appeared overnight. Viewers in Portland and Lewiston never hear that state officials had warnings as early as 2024, that Paradise was operating without a license for years while collecting six-figure monthly payments per house, or that the actual journalists who broke the story had already put Blade’s voice, over multiple sittings, and the state’s own documents in front of the public.

Credit is not courtesy. Reporter Max Williams either knew he was lifting our work or he did not. Both scenarios are disqualifying. It is how readers judge who did the work and who arrived after the risk was gone. Blade’s testimony is critical to understanding how the MaineCare Section 21 program for adults with autism and other intellectual disorders has been corrupted and is systematically failing our most vulnerable populations. There are thousands of other disabled Mainers like Blade. Maine’s Medicaid residential care crisis — much like the epidemic of Chinese organized crime — didn’t develop overnight. It is a multi-year failure of oversight, billing, and basic care for disabled adults. If the CBS affiliate was interested in doing some original work rather than aping the Maine Wire’s investigation, perhaps they could have grown Mainers’ understanding of this crisis rather than merely swiping journalists’ work for their own selfish purposes.

For WGME and all the other outlets running cover for these scammers and the establishment that supports them: You can pretend to break the occasional story and hand each other “journalism” awards, but we see that you are complicit and we intend to tell that story. Indeed, this episode and the many other cases of lazy liberal outlets stealing Maine Wire reportage are precisely why the Maine Wire continues to grow every year, as more and more Mainers understand that being a “conservative” outlet means actually doing investigative journalism rather than playing stenographer to political power.

Whatever WGME is doing, it’s not journalism.

It’s just gross.

Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston interviews Aleister Blade on June 25, 2026.

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