The story famous different oddities about the self-described homosexual Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s third Congressional District from blue to pink, and is now underneath 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 subsequent 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 nationwide headlines are presupposed to be constructed on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers confirm and amplify the story, and earlier than lengthy an rising political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for many years amid the destruction of news economies, seems to have failed fully this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s writer says it counts amongst its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several other senior folks at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has gained 19 Pulitzers — no one adopted its story earlier than Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview revealed Monday, he additionally vowed to serve out his time period as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get rather more native than the Leader. A weekly revealed and primarily run by Grant Lally, an lawyer whose mother and father purchased it in the late Nineties, most of the newspaper’s workers works half time and holds down different jobs to pay the payments.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally mentioned in an interview.
Lally was significantly well-prepared to cowl the race for New York’s third; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and once more in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s ground supervisor in Miami throughout the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s workers, which incorporates college students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely rich native communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which provides them entry to native political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” mentioned Lally.
A few years in the past, Lally mentioned, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting help for his political profession. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos advised Lally that his household was from Belgium. Years later, Lally mentioned, he watched Santos on the marketing campaign path “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally mentioned.
Lally has stayed in contact along with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would generally name him to gossip about native elections over the spring and summer season. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being advised on a few of these calls.
One tip got here from an area dwelling builder who mentioned he had pushed Santos round Long Island to have a look at mansions the candidate claimed to personal and needed to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the houses, Lally mentioned. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from coming into.
Another name got here from a state senator who mentioned a home in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to personal was price far lower than the candidate mentioned — and was owned by another person anyway.
These suggestions helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which had been deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally mentioned. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made extra of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into bigger publications similar to Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman advised the Post that there have been “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, didn’t reply particular questions on the paper’s protection of Santos but mentioned in an announcement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s attainable that the Leader’s reporting fell right into a void partly as a result of there are fewer papers to cowl the news than in the previous. The variety of journalists has declined by 60 % since 2005, in accordance with authorities statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this yr discovered that on common two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. each week. The nation has misplaced greater than 1 / 4 of its newspapers since 2005 and is on observe to lose one-third by 2025. There are actually greater than 1,600 counties with solely one newspaper, usually a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” mentioned Tim Franklin, senior affiliate dean and professor at the Medill School. “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.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Ashley Fetters Maloy and Azi Paybarah contributed to this report.