An agenda-driven Sunday paper

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There are only three stories on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today -- pushing two of the main agendas Editor Frank Scandale and his minions adopted several years ago.

Two of the stories continue an editorial campaign that seeks to portray the "high salaries" of police officers and teachers as the chief reasons our property taxes are so high.  

So it's no surprise the paper quickly became an ally of Governor Christie in his battle with the teachers union -- shifting the public's attention away from the big guy's pandering to the Borgs and other wealthy folks.

Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano's A-1 story about high pay and overtime for officers in that city only restates a situation dating to at least 2007, when the Police Department was so short-staffed, extra duty guarding utility work was given exclusively to Tenafly officers. 

Then-Englewood reporter Carolyn Feibel looked into that and actually quoted city officials as saying they refused to hire more officers because their pay was so high.

The off-lead on Page 1 is another story by a less-than-objective Cuban exile, Staff Writer Elizabeth Llorente, on political prisoners in Cuba. At one time, she and another, bitter exile, Miguel Perez, were the only reporters writing about Cuba for the former Hackensack daily. 

Scandale ignored my call from the copy desk for more objectivity.

I got a kick out of Llorente calling Cuba "a huge enigma to so many Americans." That's no surprise, given the decades of one-dimensional coverage of the island by The Record and other U.S. media. (On the map of Cuba above, how many provinces can you name?)

Local today is truly pathetic, especially for a Sunday section. A mere eight pages, there is news from only one the 70 towns in Bergen County, and none from the most diverse, Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck.