Hiding Mac Borg's role

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Don't you find it curious that today's L-3 story on the East Hill Synagogue in Englewood (map) omits any mention of how Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg was among neighbors who opposed the congregation's expansion on his East Hill block?

Nor do I see the name of attorney Bruce Rosen, who has done a lot of legal work for The Record and who represented Mac and other opponents. (When he was a reporter at the paper in the 1980s, Rosen said Mac gave him at least one mortgage to buy a house.)

At least the lazy, incompetent editors tried to bury the synagogue story omissions. (For non-Record folk, Mac Borg is chairman of North Jersey Media Group.) I recall asking Assignment Editor Dan Sforza two or three years ago, when I was a copy editor, why a short story on this same dispute didn't include Mac's name, and he said there was "no room" to mention it. Editors today can't use the same excuse for this much longer story.

Then, on Page 1 today,  a long, tortured tale about an international custody battle seems to have been deliberately distorted to shower the father with sympathy.

When you look at the headlines and the moody photo on the front page, you can only conclude the paper wants you to like this man and hate his wife. But it's only on the jump page, you discover he has been accused of of sexually abusing his own kids, and left all of them behind to escape a criminal complaint, the woman's attorney says.

It's not "a father's nightmare." It's the readers who are having nightmares.Was this the work of the courthouse reporter trying to sell the story for the front or the devious editors?  

Three corrections appear on A-2. Way to go.

Joseph Ax has stopped acting like a foreign correspondent and gone back to reporting municipal affairs in Teaneck, where he is assigned. Today, he has two stories in Local, compared to none about Hackensack, Englewood and a lot of other Bergen County towns.

A photo of the Woodland Park police chief on L-2 incorrectly says he is behind a "podium," when he is, in fact, standing at a lectern.The caption doesn't say where the swearing-in was, but I'm sure the editors could have left their Garret Mountain newsroom and popped over for refreshments.

In Better Living, Restaurant Reviewer Bill Pitcher cranks ups the hyperbole in a three-star review of sushi restaurant Umeya in Cresskill. (Publisher Stephen A. Borg lives in nearby Tenafly, in a house that is bigger than some Japanese villages.) Pitcher calls the raw fish "pristine, salmon tasting as clean as the water it was plucked from."

Of course, the salmon likely was farm-raised and, thus, artificially colored, and probably it contained other contaminants. Pitcher also fails to mention fish served raw must be frozen first to kill worms.