It’s difficult to crown the liar king because there are so many candidates, beginning with former President Donald Trump, who made some 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years of his presidency.

He’s lying again on the campaign trail.

In contention for the liar king, or kings, are Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. As The New York Times reports, senior executives and the biggest stars at Fox News privately disbelieved Trump’s rigged election claims “even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.”

But George Santos takes the crown because of the audacity of his claims and how they evolved due to neglected newsroom practices. In support of my coronation is PolitiFact’s “Guide to George Santos’ dubious statements.” The organization has tracked political falsehoods since 2007 and writes, “But we’ve never seen anyone like U.S. Rep. George Santos.”

Here are a few of his whoppers. Santos said he graduated from Baruch College, earned a Master of Business Administration degree from New York University, worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, is part Jewish, has ancestors who fled the Holocaust and a mother who was in the World Trade Center’s twin towers on 9/11 and eventually died from injuries sustained that day.

On March 2, members of the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate these falsehoods. The media will prophesy consequences when and if violations eventually are announced. But missing will be how Santos got away with these lies and what that implies about political reporting and the state of journalism.

At the center of this debate is the North Shore Leader, a weekly Long Island, New York, newspaper with a circulation of 5,000 and a readership of 20,000. It is owned by Grant Lally, a conservative Republican and 2014 candidate for the 3rd Congressional District of New York, held now by Santos.

Lally lost to incumbent Steve Israel, a Democrat, in that general election.

In September 2020, the North Star Leader reported spurious campaign filings by Santos along with claims about his net worth. However, few newsrooms took notice of his fabrications until The New York Times did an exposé after the election.

What could the media have done to hold Santos and other liars to account?

Seven standard practices

1. Monitor local news

The Knight Foundation has reminded us for years about the value of local news. If major outlets do not screen area weeklies and small dailies or maintain bureaus in their subscription areas, important disclosures will continue to be overlooked. Israel wrote about this for The Atlantic, blaming the media’s failure to investigate Santos’ lies on shrinking resources. “Newsday dominates the media landscape on Long Island,” he stated, and while its reporters do quality work, they can no longer cover everything even “in their political backyard.”

Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver, First Amendment expert and executive director of the Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication at Florida International University, agrees with that assessment. “Local news is disappearing from our newspapers. News holes are getting smaller so that profits can increase.” She adds that media companies not only are closing bureaus but also purchasing and shutting down community newspapers.

The United States continues to lose two newspapers per week, “dividing the nation into wealthier, faster growing communities with access to local news, and struggling areas without,” according to a report by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Some 70 million residents live in an area without a local newspaper or one at risk. “This is a crisis for our democracy and our society,” said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the principal author of the report.

That’s about one-fifth of the country represented by state and congressional voting districts with fewer news outlets covering their claims and campaigns.

Kathie Obradovich, editor-in-chief for Iowa Capital Dispatch, a nonprofit dedicated to state capital coverage, puts a premium on gathering local news. “We monitor newspapers and broadcast outlets from around the state, as well as social media posts from journalists and newsmakers, to ensure we’re not missing a major story.”

The Dispatch is part of the States Newsroom network that covers politics in 32 states. Monitoring them and other outlets takes editorial time but pays off in a thorough report that may lead to exclusive coverage of a major issue.

2. Inform, don’t affirm

There are many biases in the world, but confirmation bias — people believing news that affirms their suspicions — is prevalent.

In 2022, the Columbia Journalism Review explored partisan bias in newsrooms. As local newspapers close, digital-first outlets fill the news gap, often with biased views. Politically motivated networks, lacking funding transparency, parrot party talking points. Some newspapers do legitimate news but nevertheless steer coverage toward political favorites.

Confirmation bias has merged with sectarian politics, wherein people hate the opposition more than they love their own party. The combination obfuscates fact and perpetuates half-truths, exaggeration and outright falsehoods.

The Washington Post covered that effect during the midterm election cycle. “Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.”

Confirmation bias also exists in the newsroom. It influences which stories editors and reporters decide merit coverage and what kind of evidence they gather.

Obradovich says newsrooms should favor fact over faction. “Despite the partisan-driven criticism,” she says, the Dispatch hears from viewers “on both sides of the aisle who appreciate being presented with information they would not otherwise have had.

“Are they accepting information that runs against their biases? Maybe not. But they respond to fairness, even if they don’t always agree with the thrust of the report.”

3. Stick with truth

A 2022 survey of 11,889 U.S. journalists inquired whether they should report a false statement made by a public official. Some 64% favored reporting the statement because the public had a right to know whereas 32% decided not to do that because it perpetuates the falsehood. The study did not mention what percentage of those who reported the statement also factually corrected the record.

In a piece titled “The Golden Age of the Grifter, Part 2,” the North Shore Leader warns that “people will lie, cheat, steal, bamboozle and commit crimes, to take that for themselves. And trash everyone else to get it. It is a reminder that we abandon the objective reality of ‘truth’ and the moral courage to reject liars, at our dire peril.”

The American Press Institute just published a reminder, condensing 10 lessons drawn from “The Elements of Journalism” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, with the first principle titled “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.”

Refresh your memory, buy the book or visit the site.

4. Deal with social media

In 2022, half of U.S. adults got their news from social media, with 31% relying on Facebook. The Pew Research Center also reports that a quarter of viewers regularly get news from YouTube, with Twitter at 14%, Instagram at 13%, and TikTok at 10%. Users and their friends comment on these posts, typically affirming their beliefs or quoting sources out of context. This creates an “echo” chamber that undermines diverse viewpoints, appeasing like-minded users via a shared narrative.

“Everything is filtered through electronic media,” Grant Lally told one-time opponent Steve Israel in an interview published by The Hill. “They’ll believe something online but won’t believe it if it happens right in front of them.”

Journalism organizations overwhelmingly patronize social media, according to the Pew Research Center, with 94% of those surveyed utilizing 11 popular sites. However, most journalists think social media negatively affects their work “and one-third report being harassed on these platforms by someone outside their organization.”

I wrote about that recently for Editor & Publisher, noting the impact on women and the obligation of publishers to mitigate harassment.

Citing a study in Digital Journalism, Nieman Lab also wrote about that this month in “Social media policies are failing journalists.” The authors state that “platforms such as Twitter and Facebook present a dizzying array of problems, from the growing variety and intensity of online harassment — hostility, trolling, doxing, etc. — that especially targets women and journalists of color, to the constant threat that one wrong tweet might incite a mob or cost a journalist their job.”

If journalism is to compete with unreliable reports on social media, publishers and editors need to protect news workers and guide them on how to handle these platforms to mitigate the harm.

Doing otherwise jeopardizes internal relationships and newsroom retention.

5. Expand news tips

The North Shore Leader explored Santos’ lies in part because they received tips from their subscribers. Lally, in an interview with The Washington Post, said a local homebuilder drove Santos around Long Island to view mansions that Santos allegedly owned that needed renovation. But the builder wasn’t allowed inside any of them, raising suspicions. Another tip came from a state senator who reported that a house in the Hamptons that Santos said he owned was, in fact, owned by someone else.

Local newspapers know their communities and so often learn about newsworthy topics before anyone else. But major outlets often make it difficult for people to tip the newsroom about issues and events.

In 2020, the Freedom of the Press Foundation did a study of 80 online news sites to discern how people could inform newsrooms. Email and postal mail remain the most popular. The foundation published a graph showing all the tip methods of each outlet, with 27 (or fully one-third of outlets) having no discernable way to contact a newsroom with a disclosure.

Moreover, the study notes that there is no industry consensus “on where and how to provide a link to tip line information.” Often the tip line is hard to find on a news site without the help of a search engine.

Take an inventory of how your viewers can contact the newsroom. Increasingly, they are on the scene with cellphones that record spot news. If you want to engage your viewership, make them part of your operation.

6. Fact check biographies

In a post about Santos’ lies, Vox focused on his impressive biography that should have set off alarm bells. It included aforementioned lies as well as his being a successful financier who started an animal rescue charity.

In a study of 1,250 Americans by Resume Builder, 72% of respondents said they lied on their resume. “Most commonly, candidates lie about their education credentials (44%).”

PolitiFact scrutinizes claims in candidate biographies on this scale: True (13%), Mostly True (16%), Half True (16%), Mostly False (17%), False (22%), Pants on Fire (14%). Reporters should check this useful site or, better still, conduct their own fact checks on local candidates that might not be screened by this and other outlets.

Santos made the “Pants on Fire” list when he stated in a Feb. 20 interview with Piers Morgan that he never claimed to be Jewish. In that interview, Santos said about his lies, “I’ll humor you this — I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat for Congress and I got away with it then.”

Newsrooms have an obligation to fact-check the biographies of public figures in their distribution areas. That not only reveals lies and embellishments but also may lead to important future investigations.

7. Pay attention to redistricting 

All votes should be equal, but gerrymandering dilutes some and empowers others because parties can redraw maps to maximize their advantage. As the Guardian notes, “The United States stands almost alone in allowing partisan politicians to draw political districts in this way. It’s an invisible scalpel that profoundly affects US politics but also the tenor and character of the national discourse.”

In a New Yorker podcast, Lally explained how redistricting elevated Santos to a viable candidate. “This is actually the key to the whole thing,” he said, referencing New York State’s one-party government. Democrats control the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the legislature.

In February 2022, the legislature passed a gerrymandered map that heavily favored the Democrats. Lally said that Santos’ 3rd district went from “a reasonably competitive seat to a five-county completely non-competitive seat. No Republican could have won the seat now.”

Santos was still running for it. Then the state Court of Appeals rejected the map because it was too partisan and ordered a special master to draw up a new one for the midterm elections. “The Republican Party had canceled the local primary, leaving Santos as the presumed candidate,” Lally said. Without gerrymandering, Santos won.

The Brennan Center for Justice has published a useful media guide about covering redistricting, noting “real consequences for communities and how they are represented in our government.” The Center encourages reporters not only to focus on political infighting but also to discover how gerrymandering can unite or divide communities.

In the end, these seven lessons from the George Santos saga may not catch the next megalomaniacal liar. But they will remind the news desk about the importance of basic journalism tenets and civic obligations that we may have overlooked, undermining credibility and democracy.