Ouster of Santos Emphasizes the Importance of Local Papers

Congress last week on its third try finally voted to boot George Santos from the House of Representatives, making him only the sixth member of Congress to ever be expelled.

If only the powers that be had paid closer attention to the North Shore Leader. As Sarah Ellison wrote in the Washington Post in late December, 2022, “A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but nobody paid attention.”

”It’s months late, but it is good riddance to him,” said Grant Lally, the publisher of the North Shore Leader in Oyster Bay. “He hurt a lot of people, very deliberately and very cruelly,” said Lally. “He never should have been in the U.S. Congress in the first place.” If only people had listened to Lally’s paper back then.

Now Lally is urging Judge Joanna Sybert, who is overseeing the pending criminal case, to either revoke bail or have Santos wear an ankle bracelet. He points out that Brazil, where Santos was born, has no formal extradition treaty with the United States. “If they don’t impose bail, he will flee,” Lally said he editorialized this week in the North Shore Leader.

By the time the New York Times ran its first article on how George Santos had fabricated much of his resume, it was December 2020, and Santos was already the representative-elect.

The North Shore Leader was on to the story in September, 2022 two months before the election. Santos finally filed his financial disclosure form (not on time) in September, 2022, and Lally said he was not entirely surprised Santos wildly exaggerated his net income. Oddly, while Santos was boasting that he owned homes on Duane Road in the Hamptons and in tony Oyster Bay Cove, he listed none of them on his financial disclosure form. “That was when we called him a fabulist,” said Lally, an attorney whose parents bought the paper in the 1990s. He was an old-school Republican who had run for the seat himself several times, but until Santos it was always a Democratic seat. Lally worked on the George W. Buch election campaign during the Florida recount.

But lifelong Republican Lally endorsed the Democrat Robert Zimmerman in the 2022 election.

Three other news articles before the election told of new revelations of fraud and fabrication. But it was crickets from all the other news outlets. Lally’s paper won the Truth to Power Award, named after Gabe Pressman from the New York Press Club.

”We did what we had to do,” Lally told me.

It is probably one of the most dramatic recent examples of the importance of local media. In our own case at Straus Media, we have not quite equaled that, but we do have some examples in the past year of holding truth to power. Early in the year, we told how Madison Square Garden had booted another attorney using facial recognition technology. When local Assembly member Alex Bores joined other politicians at a press conference seeking to end the use of facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden, the MSG CEO James Dolan disinvited Bores from an event. Thankfully, our scoops were quickly picked up, with credit, by the New York Post. Michael Oreskes reporting on Penn Station and Madison Square Garden has turned Straus Media’s four Manhattan newspapers into a virtual paper of record on all the twists and turns in that multi-billion dollar real estate and mass transit story.

City Hall announced it was going to tear down two NYCHA apartment complexes in Chelsea and spend $1.5 billion to build two new towers in a public/private partnership. We dispatched one of our summer interns, who was fluent in Spanish, to gauge the residents’ reactions. When she interviewed the residents there, she found some did not want to be booted from their longtime homes to make way for the renovation. The Legal Aid Society saw our story, contacted us, and is looking into the matter to see if residents are really properly informed. And the issue is one that is likely to have reverberations. Mayor Eric Adams said at a recent press conference that he expected to follow the “Chelsea model” for other NYCHA projects down the road.

More recently, our Crime Watch columnist Jerry Danzig ran a small item that a senior citizen on the Upper East Side had lost nearly $2.7 million when he was targeted by scammers claiming, falsely, that his social security card was used by drug dealers in a money laundering scheme in Mexico. The senior citizen eventually went to the NYPD and reported the scam–one of the largest we had ever heard about–but it was not until Straus News contacted the district attorney’s office that the DA’s office also began taking an active interest in the scam. We will keep you posted on how that one turns out.

We may or may not win some awards for these stories. But that is not the point. Like the North Shore Leader and countless other publications on the local level, we listen to the readers and report on local parades, art, education, theater and recreational matters, but also crimes and intrigues. It is tougher than ever to thrive on the local level. Straus Media is profitable, but like the North Shore Leader and countless other publications, the picture has not yet returned to the pre-COVID levels. And if local publications are not reporting, there is much news that will simply not get covered. Lally said the publicity helped him boost his paid circulation modestly and he said he is proud that the paper continued to print weekly all through COVID. The point is not to win awards and accolades, although they are nice. As long as we are here, we are looking out for you, the readers, that we want to serve day in and day out.