George Santos was elected to Congress last month from New York’s Third District, helping the Republican Party take control of the House with a slim majority. Six weeks after the election, the New York Times and other news organizations reported that Santos appeared to have made up almost everything in his biography, like graduating from Baruch College, working as a financial manager at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and creating a nonprofit animal rescue organization called Friends of Pets United.
On Monday, Santos admitted that he had “embellished” his résumé and had never graduated from college or worked on Wall Street, but he denied being wanted for fraud in his native Brazil, as the Times has reported, or having misled voters by falsely claiming that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” he told the New York Post. “I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’ ”
Observers of the press have asked how news organizations could have missed the story of this miscreant until it was too late, and Santos had won the election. For one thing, the major New York dailies — the Times and Newsday — hadn’t assigned a single reporter to cover that race.
But media critic Dan Kennedy writes that a local weekly paper, the North Shore Leader in Locust Valley, broke much of the Santos story more than four months ago. Three weeks before the election, the Leader reported that Santos directed a venture capital fund that was shut down by the S.E.C. as a…
