One upstate New York paper, the Corning Leader, is siding with Democratic Rep. Eric Massa over the YouTube dust-up on statements he made about health care, despite the fact that its hometown mayor, Tom Reed, is Massa’s leading GOP challenger.

Massa has caught flak for telling progressive activists, in an exchange caught on video, that on health care, he would “vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful.”

But in a Friday editorial entitled “Massa doing the job he was elected to do,” the Leader wrote that Massa’s statements illustrate that he is “an independent thinker who’s willing to make a tough choice no matter how unpopular.”