Too bad nobody paid attention
New York is one of the few metro areas that still has a number of different big newspapers but even so it was a small local weekly that had the George Santos story long before the election. Nobody picked it up:
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
The story goes on to lament the nation’s loss of local newspapers which is on track to have lost one-third of them by 2025. They quote Tim Franklin of the Medill School of journalism saying, “local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street. Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
That’s certainly true but it won’t do much good if nobody pays attention. This local paper had the story and it was potentially very juicy. The Democratic opponent tried to get the broader media interested and they didn’t care. I’m not sure what’s going to fix that.