Liz Collin grew up “obsessed” with the news. Growing up in Worthington in southwest Minnesota, she stayed up to watch the 10 p.m. news before she’d even finished elementary school, and she started a neighborhood newspaper when she was just 10-years-old. Unsurprisingly, she made a successful career out of this passion, becoming a mainstay of Minnesota’s mainstream news and winning multiple Emmys for her work.
Then, politics and culture hit a boiling point in 2020 as Black Lives Matter riots swept the country, and Collin found herself and her state caught in the crosshairs.
As Minneapolis burned, Collin said she was shocked to watch the mainstream media push its own narrative instead of reporting the truth about the severity of the Black Lives Matter riots. Collin’s husband worked in law enforcement, and the backlash was immediate. Protestors arrived at her house, destroyed a piñata that looked like her, and threatened to burn down the town.
Fast forward to today and Minnesota is back under national scrutiny over allegations of fraud—and Collin is still on the frontlines, breaking the stories that mainstream reporters would rather not tell.
For Collin, this kind of fearless reporting just comes naturally. Collin got her start in media with her first job at her local AM radio station, and after college, she built her reporting chops across the country in North Dakota, Kansas, and Pennsylvania. But her hope was always to return home.
When an opportunity arose at WCCO, Minnesota’s local CBS station, she jumped on it and quickly became a face recognized across the state as she covered topics that mattered to everyday Minnesotans, from public safety to political campaigns.
But after more than a decade at WCCO, Collin said the newsroom became hyper-politicized and began to disregard truth and facts as guiding principles. She pointed to examples of tips the station received but did not report on because of an overarching agenda. She added that a new generation of reporters had grown up hearing about “your truth” and “my truth,” which meant objectivity too often went out the door.
“To me, there’s always the truth,” she told IW Features.
In 2020, the Left’s ideological crusade reached its pinnacle. And Collin’s family came under attack. Collin’s husband was the police union chief when calls to “defund the police” reached their pinnacle, and activists targeted Collin and her career because of her marriage.
Meanwhile, the world of independent journalism was growing as more Americans turned to new media sources for their daily dose of news. Collin recognized a need for this in her own state, where people were hearing only one side of the story from the mainstream media.
“Minnesota is the way it is, frankly, because of that lack of information,” she said. “It’s kind of this echo chamber that everybody’s telling the same story in the same way, in the same order, on the nightly news.”
It’s why she joined Minnesota’s independent media industry in 2022 as an investigative reporter with Alpha News. There, she’s breaking Minnesota news and exposing corruption in her documentaries, articles, and “Liz Collin Reports” segments.
She’s seen how corruption, fraud, and crime have impacted the state she grew up in, explaining that law enforcement ranks in the state have thinned and that a record number of first responders have been tragically killed.
“When you demonize law enforcement and you … perpetuate these divisive narratives, it’s dangerous,” she said. “It’s dangerous for citizens of Minnesota. It’s dangerous for the law enforcement profession.”
She recounted speaking at the University of Minnesota recently and having dozens of police officers there for her protection, but recalled not needing any law enforcement protection when she regularly covered stories on the campus when she reported with WCCO.
“It doesn’t scare me,” she said. “The thing that keeps me up at night is, what if we stop doing this work or what if we stop talking or what if we stop pushing back? Those are the things that really I’m fearful of.”
The risk Collin takes for telling the truth isn’t without its reward. She said she’s heard from people around the world who discovered the other side of the story from her work.
“That’s why facts do matter,” she said.
“A lot of times we’ll put a story out, we’ll be bashed for putting the story out, and then the mainstream media will get to it a few weeks later,” Collin added.
According to Collin, young Minnesotans in particular are eager to see their state free from corruption, with many of her tips coming from college students.
“People turn to us to tell their story or trust us to tell their story, and it’s kind of this little ripple effect that I feel almost daily that we can measure and see in Minnesota,” she said.
And as Minnesota hits national headlines each week for fraud and political scandals, Collin said she’ll remain on the frontlines of the stories that matter to everyday Americans.
“I kind of just feel like that kid from Worthington still fighting for the hometown story,” she said.
