The Times doesn't do local coverage for Long Island. They cover news there, in essence, the same way they do news from anywhere. When there's a big story (lik

The Times doesn't do local coverage for Long Island. They cover news there, in essence, the same way they do news from anywhere. When there's a big story (like Santos is now), they'll put reporters on it. But they don't have people digging everywhere in the world for local details. In this case, it was a house race. There are 435 such races. It would surely be great if the Times would vet all 870 major party candidate for us, but in practice that's not feasible given their revenue structure. We need to rely on local journalism like the linked coverage of the North Shore Leader. And as it happened, they did their jobs. But none of us were listening because, collectively, no one gave much thought to a house race in a left-leaning district in a deep blue state. The whole thing blew up only because Santos (somewhat surprisingly) won his race.