Joe Sokol was standing on a public sidewalk in Maine, camera rolling, reporting on a methadone clinic pulling significant Medicaid dollars. A car swerved directly at him, struck his camera equipment, and kept driving.
Two cameras caught the whole thing. Including the license plate.
Sokol is a reporter for The Maine Wire, a conservative outlet that has been digging into Medicaid spending in the state — the kind of reporting that makes certain people nervous. He was filming outside the clinic when a vehicle veered toward him in what looks, on video, exactly like what it is: a deliberate attempt to hit a journalist with a car.
The footage, which dropped October 1 and is still going viral, shows the car closing distance on Sokol fast enough to make contact with his camera rig. Not a close call in traffic. Not an accident at an intersection. A car turning toward a man standing on a sidewalk.
The plate number — 841 LZD — is visible on camera. Two separate angles confirm the vehicle, the trajectory, and the impact with equipment. As Not the Bee's Joel Abbott put it: "If you are going to try your luck at vehicular homicide, don't do it when two cameras are recording you ... and certainly don't leave the victim alive to give your license plate number to the cops!"
No word yet on whether local police have arrested the driver.
That's the part worth sitting with. A reporter gets attacked on camera, by a vehicle, while investigating how public money flows through a methadone clinic — and the guy drives off. The plate is on video. The incident is on video. The reporter is alive to file a report. And still, as of publication, no arrest.
Now run the thought experiment we're all thinking. A conservative drives a car at a CNN correspondent outside a government-funded facility. How many hours before the FBI holds a press conference? How many minutes before every cable network runs the footage on a loop with the word "terrorism" in the chyron?
The story Sokol was reporting on — Medicaid funding flowing to methadone clinics in Maine — is the kind of local accountability journalism that used to win awards. Follow the taxpayer money, show up with a camera, ask questions. That's it. That's what got a car aimed at him.
Which raises the obvious question nobody in Maine law enforcement seems eager to answer: what exactly is happening at that clinic that made someone willing to commit assault on camera rather than let a reporter keep filming?
