By Chris Satullo
George Santos has taught us something valuable – and not just that wearing a periwinkle-blue vest to your first day as a (maybe) member of Congress is a regrettable fashion choice.
He’s also reminded us that local journalists are an under-appreciated bulwark of democracy, whom we ignore at our (and the republic’s) peril.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the ever-lengthening list of lies that the newly sworn congressman from Long Island has spun. He’s been caught in whoppers about college degrees, job experience, business success, Jewish ancestry. He’s even been nailed for weirdly specific falsehoods that had nothing to do with his electoral credentials – like his claim that four employees of his (apparently nonexistent) investment company had died in the Tampa gay nightclub shootings.
Can you say pathological?
As I first read the New York Times’ expose of Santos’ lies last month, my first thought was this very profound one: “Wow!” My second, though, was: “Why, dear Gray Lady, are you just telling us this now?” Wasn’t the right time to expose Santos’ geyser of prevarication before Long Island voters decided to make him their voice on Capitol Hill?
I was far from the only person having this thought. The Times article unleashed a torrent of critiques of various players who’d been asleep at the fact-checking switch before the 2022 midterms.
Some were inclined to knock the national Republican Party for putting such an incompetent fabulist on its ticket – while others pointed out that Santos was utterly on-brand for the party of Trump, Boebert, Gosar, Gaetz and Taylor Greene. Fish gotta swim, or something like that.
The search for a scapegoat then turned to the campaign staff of his Democratic opponent, Robert Zimmerman. Why, many asked, did his campaign not do that most basic task of modern politics: opposition research, or “oppo” as the cool kids call it? And, if the local team in this crucial district was that incompetent, why didn’t the state Democratic party or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee step in to help?
We did do oppo, Zimmerman replied, but when my team tried to feed local media the flaws we’d found in Santos’ spiel, they didn’t bite. (Note to innocent readers: Campaigns have fed oppo on their opponents to newspapers since back when John Adams was beefing with Thomas Jefferson. On their better days, newsrooms actually check out the truth of such allegations before running with them.)
Two problems with Zimmerman’s alibi: 1) His team didn’t uncover more than half of the flat-out lies that made the Times story so accessibly juicy and 2) Nothing was stopping his campaign from putting out what they did find in mailings or campaign ads. They just didn’t do it.
Zimmerman’s blame-shifting did manage to spawn a national chorus of valid laments about the death of local journalism.
Without doubt, the dominant Long Island news organization, Newsday, one-time winner of 19 Pulitzers, did not cover itself in glory here. With only a handful of local congressional races to cover, it had no excuse for failing to apply Journalism 101 to Santos’ resume. (The tardy Times also shares in the indictment here; yeah, its metro operation has three states and five boroughs to worry about, but it also has more bodies to throw at elections than just about anyone else. Its trumpeting of its Santos story weeks too late was just weird and maddening.)
Generally, newsrooms have many fewer bodies to deploy than before. Northwestern University’s Medill School says America is losing two newspapers a week, mostly of the small, local variety, and the overall number of journalists working at newspapers has dropped by more than 50 percent since 2006. A Pew Research Study report notes that those losses have been offset to a degree by increases in staff at digital-only publications. But Pew concedes that those operations often are devoted to single topics, not general news – and usually cluster around big cities, leaving news deserts elsewhere.
Still, this death-of-local-media narrative, despite its surface plausibility, had one pesky flaw in the Santos case: One local paper, a weekly caller the North Shore Leader, actually was on the story early, often, and fiercely.
It exposed much of what the Times later reported before G’islanders went to the polls. And its editorial endorsing Zimmerman was memorably blunt: “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican (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.”
The weekly’s circulation is small, but sufficiently affluent and influential that its ground-breaking work should not have been ignored. Among the subscribers to the North Shore Leader is Sean Hannity of Fox News. True, expecting him to blow the whistle on a lying GOP candidate is like believing Godot will show up any minute now. But several Newsday executives also subscribe; apparently, they got a little behind on the local reconnaissance-reading any good editor should do.
I also detect a flaw in American political journalism that predates the decline in newsroom staffing, one that exasperated me even while I worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer in its halcyon days. Political reporters tend to ignore candidates whom the smart money thinks can’t win. Rather than seeing it as their First Amendment duty to give all serious candidates enough coverage to help voters make an informed choice, they think like sports reporters: I want to cover the Big Game, not the 1 p.m. NFL tilt with CBS’ greenest announcing team. And no number of “upset” wins that they didn’t see coming – Dave Brat beating Eric Cantor in 2014, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Joe Crowley in 2018 – can seem to break them of the habit.
Still, this time, somebody in the trenches of local journalism did do their job. So, thank you, North Shore Leader, for saving the Fourth Estate’s tattered honor.
But – and this is the ultimate sadness of this fiasco – we didn’t pay attention. Not just the voters of New York’s Third Congressional District. None of us did. As we so often don’t. We wander in a mirrored maze of digital platforms, losing our bearings, missing the point, oblivious to the damage.
Even I, a proud denizen of newspaper newsrooms for 40 years, sometimes go days now without giving any local news site a thorough read. My news habit, I’m chastened to admit, on some days devotes less time to reading hard news than to skimming YouTube clips of late-night monologues and biased MSNBC host riffs. Even if I lived in the Santos congressional district, I might have missed the North Shore Leader’s bracing dismissal of the jerk.
And even if Newsday had jumped onto the story hard, in timely manner, it might not have made that much of a difference. Its print circulation, once around 430,000, has shrunken to around 90,000. And its digital reach – driven mostly by hits from targeted Google searches – does not offset that loss of eyeballs or impact.
A long time ago, a prescient thinker named Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. None of us is exempt from that risk, that indictment. It won’t do just to point the finger at one particular campaign operation or newsroom. We’re all part of the failure of attention that rewards a George Santos with an elite post he in no way deserves; a failure of attention that has put our democracy on the endangered species list.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia