There is something about The North Shore Leader (circulation: give or take 20,000) that gets right under George Santos’s skin. While he has refused recent requests for comment about his many alleged misdeeds from Politico and The New York Times and hasn’t even given an interview to Fox News since the middle of February, he responded to my e-mail inquiry about the tiny local paper in little over an hour. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: The North Shore Leader was the first newspaper to call out his lies and begin what ultimately became a devastating, and hugely entertaining, media pile-on.
“This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican for US Congress,” wrote the editors of The North Shore Leader about New York’s Third Congressional District election back in October 2022. “But the GOP nominee – George Santos – is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot.” Upping the ante, they called Santos “an insecure child,” “a fabulist,” and “a fake.”
