The local media had the Santos story in September. Why didn’t anyone else?
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This is profoundly embarrassing for the New York Democratic Party and New York-based major media outlets:
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.”
September! The establishment wing of the NY Democratic Party is an unprincipled machine that is also really bad at winning competitive elections, the worst possible combination. Any competent oppo campaign should have spotted this.
Then there’s the New York Times, which in addition to an infinite number of Trump safaris sent 6 reporters to write 4 stories about Alan Dershowitz’s dinner invitations on Martha’s Vineyard. Really seems like they should have been able to follow up on this before Election Day, given that a local outlet had the most important element of the story (and make the appropriate inferences about its implications against its ideological interests.)