Where The Hell Was The Press??   #255

By Hank Silverberg  

Those of us who follow politics and elections learned a big lesson over this past week. If you concentrate on the big picture, you sometimes miss important items that matter.   

Take the case of newly elected Republican Congressman George Santos. We now know that he lied about his education, his work experience, his wealth and his ethnicity as he was campaigning for the job in New York State's 3rd Congressional District on Long Island.   

He's not college educated as he claimed, nor did he attend either of the two colleges he listed, nor did he work for two big financial corporations like he put on his resume', and he is not wealthy. He's also not Jewish as he claimed. These were all things he either highlighted on his official resume or talked about during the campaign. It means his entire campaign was based on lies. 

The question many folks now have, including those who voted for him, is "why didn't the media pick up on George Santos' lies before the election and expose them?"  Why didn't his Democratic opponent check him out? And why did the local GOP leadership claim to be in the dark about his background, or were they?  

https://longislandbusiness.com/2022/12/george-santos-story-broke-by-local-li-newspaper-months-ago/

The New York Times takes credit for exposing this story last week with all these details and more, but it was too late. Santos was already elected. The voters feel abused. And The Times did not actually break the story.  The North Shore Leader, a small weekly Long Island newspaper 

www.theleaderonline.com/single-post/santos-filings-now-claim-net-worth-of-11-million    

with about 20,000 readers that covers his New York 3rd District, questioned some of Santos' claims in September before the election. That included his claim that he lived in a mansion and had personal wealth of $11 million. 

The newspaper found Santos had no bank accounts, no stock accounts and no real property which put many of the other claims into question.  

But no one paid attention to that original article, including other media, his Democratic opponent or the local Republican party. 

Santos also claimed his grandparents survived the Holocaust and gave them a fake name he claimed was Ukranian. And he said his mother had died on 9-11, when she actually died in 2016. 

The increased scrutiny of his background has now led to federal and state investigations of his campaign financing, including a $700,000 loan he claimed to have given to his own campaign. Question: where did the money actually come from? 

Why hasn't the GOP already taken steps to keep this perpetual liar out of office? The likely reason is that Kevin McCarthy is in a battle for his bid to be Speaker of the House and may need a vote from Santos to win the job. So, no action yet, though I suspect Santos will face some consequences eventually. 

I also think that the larger news outlets in New York missed the boat here and should have picked up on this story after the local paper reported it. But the major market media seemed to be focused on the big picture and missed a good story staring them in the face. There was all that pre-election talk about control of Congress, and yet no one thought a candidate who was making things up about himself was worth looking into.  

All this makes you wonder what other political shenanigans have gone undetected because of the slow disappearance of local reporting. 

_______________________________________  _____---            Journalism 101

If someone says it’s raining & another

person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to

quote them both. 

Your job is to look out the darn window and find out which is true."

                                             Source:  Sally Clark

__________________________________________________________________

Small town newspapers and radio stations used to be the first source of information in congressional races. They followed them closely. But a recent study indicated there are now 1,800 communities across the country that have no source of local news at all, and thousands of others that have some kind of newspaper that doesn't really cover news. 

In 2019, the year before Covid, the number of working reporters nationwide dropped by 2,000. And since the pandemic, some 36,000 newspaper employees have been laid off.

Many local radio stations have not only stopped local news, but don't even have local personalities on the air, using only syndicated programming all the time. 

In the old days we covered the local candidates (I was one of them), we reported on their statements, their position on issues and yes, we checked their background. Ironically, that's actually easier to do now in the internet age. But the media outlets which used to do such work are mostly gone. The reporters who spent their time engrossed in covering local politics are also mostly gone. Some of the lucky ones rose to bigger jobs in bigger media markets, some of the unlucky ones have been forced to move over to other fields to make a living. 

Small town local newspapers have mostly folded.  

The small market radio stations that used to report local news are now few and far between, and those that remain are mostly in communities without major market competition.           

In some places, local blogs, or on-line community bulletin boards, fill some of the gap, but their quality is usually poor, and their information is often put out by partisan groups seeking to influence you rather than the balanced approach to news and information from a professionally trained journalist. 

The end result, news seems to focus only on national polarizing issues that often give a false narrative of what is going on in your town.

An example: The national media often focuses on the crime rate in big cities where the increase in violent crime was up 4.4 percent in 2022. But the crime rate in Rural America, particularly gun crimes, was up 40%. The impression you get without the local reporting is that crime is only up in big cities and that guns are only problems in places like Chicago or L-A.    

There is some hope though, for local news coverage. Groups like the American Journalism Project are trying to rebuild local media. That includes the promotion and funding of non-profit newsrooms, https://www.theajp.org/   both print and broadcast, that are driven by community needs rather than the bottom line. 

Some major media groups are on board with this concept, as are some journalism schools. If you know of one in your area you may want to help. 

Reviving active local news under new financial models is extremely important, not just to the future of journalism, but to the future of our country. 

The Washington Post has a slogan on their masthead, which has been mostly maligned by those outside the news business. But it's the truth. "Democracy dies in Darkness."   

More People 

By the time you finish reading this section of my blog, which should take about 75 seconds, there will be two more people living in the United States than when you started. The U.S. Census Bureau is projecting that the country's population as of January 1st at 334,233,854. That's an increase of 1,571,393 people from a year ago, or about .47%. Since the official United States Census was taken on April 1st, 2020, the population of the United States has gone up .84%, or 2,784,573 people.  

In case you are numbers challenged, that means we have more than 334 million people in the U.S., or over 1.5 million more from this time last year. 

Those figures include ALL people living here, not just citizens. 

The estimate says there is one birth every nine seconds in the United States, and one death every 10 seconds. The combination of births, deaths and international migration means one new resident every 27 seconds. 

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/happy-new-year-2023.html

How does that fit in worldwide? The projected world population on January 1st, 2023, is 7.9 billion (7,942,645,086) with an increase of 73.7 million since last New Year's Day.

The United States is the third most populated country in the world. China has the most with more than 1.4 billion people. India is second with over 1.3 billion people.  

Dumbest Quote of The Week!

The saga of George Santos may be just beginning, and of course the Republican Congressman outweighed EVERYONE for dumbest quote this week. He lied on his resume about where he worked, where he went to college (he didn't go at all), and his ethnicity. Trying to respond this week, Santos said this:

“I never claimed to be Jewish. … Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background. I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’” 

No one is quite sure what that means. As I wrote above--no excuse for some of the New York or national media for not catching this one or any of the other lies, BEFORE the vote. 

My blog is a bit shorter this week because so far, it's been a relatively uneventful new year. Happy New Year. 

(Your comments and suggestions are welcome) 

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