Subterfuge in the News

The Santos Saga

When the story broke about George Santos, something got overshadowed by the outrageous trail of lies he told that made him seem a clone of Trump, himself a notorious liar and Santos’ biggest enabler. The media and political pundits almost immediately pounced on the story as an affirmation of the importance of local news. Had a vigorous local press not been sidelined by financial distress engineered by Silicon Valley, the thinking went, voters might have known about his deception before Election Day instead of afterwards. He might have lost.

photo by Roman Kraft

The trouble with that thinking: A local paper did expose Santos, months before the election, and it didn’t seem to make a difference. The first openly gay Republican, Santos nevertheless won his Long Island seat in New York’s third congressional district even though the district leans Democratic. Residents of the relatively affluent and well-educated enclave only voted for one Republican presidential candidate in the last twenty-eight years. 

The Santos saga says much about the state of American politics but is also says worlds about the state of the nation’s journalism. Almost everyone agrees that local news is a vital to a functioning democracy. If so, how did Santos get elected? Do citizens really think so little of local news that they would ignore reports from the North Shore Leader on Long Island and vote for Santos, a serial liar? 

Many factors played a role in why Santos won his seat in Congress. One is the Leader’s small readership: It has a circulation of only about 20,000 in a congressional district of 739,197 residents, according to the Census Bureau. Sarah Ellison reported in the Washington Post that the publisher, Grant Lally, dabbled extensively in local Republican politics, and that the staff relies heavily on part-time reporters, including students and retirees. Do readers assign less credibility to newspapers run by a politically active publishers that don’t staff the paper with full-time journalists? Could be, but we really don’t know.

I think a major reason Santos evaded detection before the election involves gaping holes in the journalistic ecosystem created by the long slog of news industry financial problems that shows few signs of easing. 

A healthier and more vibrant news ecosystem existed when I got my start in journalism at the Des Moines Register in the 1970s. At the time, the Register, a strong local paper, took pride in covering its backyard. If a story broke in Iowa, the Register was on it. The paper’s state editor, Jack Gillard, routinely pored over small town papers like the Leader. If he found a story that looked interesting, he’d dispatch a Register reporter to the scene to report and write its own story, usually giving some credit to the local paper.

Once the Register validated the story, the Associated Press office in Des Moines would pick it up and give it much wider exposure. If it was good enough, the New York Times bureau in Chicago would drop by Iowa and do a story for the Times. A serendipitous system existed for a local story to make its way to a national audience. That’s what’s broken. 

The North Shore Leader published vigorous reports on Santos. The paper didn’t mince words. Indeed, before the election, the paper published reports that said Santos misrepresented his stands on abortion and Ukraine, that he lied about his finances and real estate holdings, his residence, and that he was involved in a multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme, and on and on. The paper even said fellow Republicans were calling him “George Scam-tos” The Leader, a Republican paper, endorsed Santos’ Democratic opponent, calling Santos a fabulist and fake. Yet he won with fifty-four percent of the vote! 

No Long Island version of the Des Moines Register stepped in to validate and elevate the Santos-is-a-liar story to the next journalistic level. The natural candidate for that role is Newsday, a daily paper that once vigorously covered Long Island. 

“The media’s failure to dig into the Santos story shows the predicaments local newsrooms face,” says Steve Israel, a former congressman who represented parts of Long Island from 2001 to 2017. “Newsday dominates the media landscape on Long Island,” he wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. “Its’ reporters do quality work – they turned out an important investigation just a few years ago that exposed racism in the real estate industry”

But Newsday blew the George Santos story. Israel says the paper no longer has the resources to cover everything. That’s true. A company I once worked for, the Tribune Company, played huge role in slashing Newsday’s budgets. But Lally says some of Newsday’s top people subscribed to his newspaper. “They appear to have written off New York’s third district as low priority given the district’s Democratic tilt,” says Israel. “So did the other once mighty New York media area operations.”

The decline of the large regional papers like Newsday, the Chicago Tribune and the Des Moines Register isn’t given enough attention in the hand wringing over the evolving disintegration of news organizations. They once had their own competitive national news operations and guarded their local territory as furiously as a hawk defends its’ nest. Heads would roll if, heaven forbid, they got scooped on a local story by the New York Times. 

But regional papers are hamstrung by declining staffs. Most are asked to do more on slimmer budgets closely monitored by stingy owners or private equity funds that bleed the papers of cash while spending as little as they can on covering the news. They charge readers more and give them less, motiving them to turn to social media outlets that provide news that is free and prone to manipulation by unscrupulous operators.

The result is people like Santos getting sworn into seats in the U.S. Congress. He’s not the only committed liar in Congress. But he’s currently the most obvious one, and he casts a shadow of doubt on the declining number of lawmakers who want to do the right thing. By inattention, the media helped him get elected. But so did voters who didn’t learn enough about the man who now represents them. 

Americans are reluctant to pay more for the news. I can’t tell you how many times over the last decade I’ve heard people say: “Why should I pay for a newspaper when I can get the news free online?” My response? George Santos.

 —James O’Shea

Follow Five W’s: