Keeping the story alive to sell papers

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Does anybody but Governor Christie and the media think a union leader's satirical memo was a death threat, and deserves A-1 play today? Does anybody but The Record of Woodland Park and the rest of the media take the racist, hate-mongering Tea Party seriously (three prominent stories in two days, including a Page 1 story Thursday)? 

Did you hear the sound bite on network news from a Tea Party member saying President Obama is doing exactly what Hitler did? Of course, the unseen reporter didn't want to  ruin it by asking this pitiful man to explain his ridiculous comparison. The Record is complicit in this kind of inflammatory coverage. The lazy, incompetent editors and the Borgs -- absentee landlords whose support for them is unwavering -- just want to sell papers.


In an earlier post, I noted the pathetic coverage of Hackensack and other Bergen County towns and attributed this to head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes:

"Hey, look at all this local news. Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha (eventually merging into a shriek that rolls across the Woodland Park newsroom). Aren't we having fun covering every town but Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895?"

Publisher John Borg (1922-48) and Editor Donald G. Borg (1932-75) must be turning over in their graves, and if this news blackout keeps up, former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg may meet an early grave.

A lawyer for North Jersey Media Group actually asked Superior Court Judge Joseph S. Conte last week to preserve its right to sue "Eye on The Record" for defamation, calling what I said about Malcolm Borg "a threat." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?


Do you wonder why Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin spends so much time beating up on teachers and so little on condemning the governor for pandering to the Borgs and other rich families, screwing just about everybody else and refusing to ease his budget woes by taxing the wealthy and raising the low gasoline levy?


Look in vain for Hackensack news in Local today. Why does picking yet another developer for a Fort Lee parcel vacant for three decades merit L-1 coverage? Syracuse University alumni in North Jersey also is a non-story. But the story on the Teaneck superintendent -- scolded for urging voters to approve the school budget -- to me, that's front-page news.


Columnist John "Pothole" Cichowski actually writes today that "public transportation [is] still in its adolescence." That's not true, but readers may not know that from his hundreds of columns about drivers and the anti-mass transit screes from Transportation Reporter Tom Davis.



In Better Living today, freelancer Amy Kuperinsky tells readers a new Japanese restaurant in Fort Lee wants "North Jerseyans dining on this side of the Hudson River to be privy to the type of yakitori ... prevalent in the East Village." That undoubtedly will come as a surprise to the owners of Yakitori 39 on DeGraw Avenue in Teaneck (that, I recall, Kuperinsky wrote about last year).