A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened.

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how the story began. “We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things,” Lally told her. “He was so well known, at least in the more active political circles, to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamtos.” Lally explains how redistricting drama in New York State turned Santos from a “sacrificial” candidate—to whom no one was paying attention—to a front-runner. At the same time, Malone thinks, “the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues” enabled his penchant for fabrication. “[There’s] lots of crazy stuff that’s popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, Eh, who’s gonna check?”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:15.3	The Trump years were a frenzy of daily, deliberate fabrication.
0:25.7	So perhaps the revelations about Congressman George Santos' self-fashionings aren't as shocking to us as they should be.
0:28.8	But you've got to give him credit.
0:30.2	His lies are extra.
0:33.3	They've ranged from the injuries he got on the college volleyball team.
0:36.4	By the way, a sport
0:37.7	he never played at a college he never attended, to alleged criminal misrepresentation
0:43.5	on campaign finance.
0:46.3	He's gone from punchline to pariah, even in his own party.
0:50.8	He's a national joke, he's an international joke, but this joke's got to go.
0:55.3	He is a stain on the House of Representatives.
0:58.0	He's a stain on the third congressional district.
1:00.9	Mr. Santos, haven't you done enough harm?
1:04.8	Most of us first learned about Santos from reporting in the pages of the New York Times.
1:09.8	But the story really emerged months earlier in a newspaper called The North Shore Leader.
1:15.5	They were sounding the alarm, except nobody really heard it.
1:19.7	Staff writer Claire Malone, who covers the media and politics, wanted to find out how the story actually started.
1:44.1	So I went out to Long Island to meet with Grant Lally, who is the publisher of the North Shore leader, and also with Maureen Daly, who is the managing editor of the paper. I'm Hannah Lerley. Yeah, I'm Claire Malone. Are you, Maureen? I am. Maureen, lovely to meet you. Yeah. How are you? I'm good.
1:44.8	We're probably going to bring you into the conference. Okay. Do you mind if I go ahead? No, wherever you want to go. Claire, what is the North Shore leader? What kind of paper is it? The North Shore leader serves kind of a wealthy, pretty white suburban area of Long Island, and it has about a circulation of 5,000, so it's pretty small.
2:03.9	This is a cutting-edge. the pretty white suburban area of Long Island. And it has about a circulation of 5,000.
	...

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