The borough of Paramus to The Record: Drop dead!

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Paramus officials say this and other malls can't open before 7 a.m. Friday.

Wow. 

Paramus residents say F.U. to Editor Francis Scandale and The Record of Woodland Park today, as well as to all those maniacal shoppers who were hoping to awake in the middle of the night, tear through borough streets and score big bargains at shopping malls.

That was a big, pleasant surprise when I looked at Page 1, because just the day before, Scandale pulled out all the stops to make a 5 a.m. opening seem certain -- hoping to sell tons of papers now and land tons of retail advertising later. What a sell-out.

All that lavish A-1 coverage and the big, boring photo should have reminded readers the former Hackensack daily has never been objective about Bergen County's restrictive shopping hours. 

Some years ago, the paper made no secret of the tens of thousands of dollars and all the editorial muscle it put behind the campaign to kill the Sunday blue laws -- in a naked bid for more advertising revenue -- but readers (voters) told the editors to take a walk. The drop headline on Tuesday:

Paramus expected to OK one-time reprieve

But Scandale keeps on trying to put readers last. He's hounded by greedy Publisher Stephen A. Borg to publish stories with commercial tie-ins that are little more than free advertising.

Free stuff is now OK

Once barred by the paper's own ethics policy, taking free stuff is no longer taboo, as Borg's handpicked food editor, Susan Leigh Sherrill, has made clear in just about everything she writes or tweets. Her stuff sounds suspiciously like public relations for celebrity chefs, restaurateurs and cookbook authors.

Not long after he came to The Record, Scandale  himself scarfed up free tickets to the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall that had been mailed to the features department.

With tens of thousands of Koreans living in North Jersey, you'd think the clueless assignment desk -- laboring under the misguided leadership of Deirdre Sykes -- would send out a reporter to ask them about the North's attack on South Korea (A-1 and A-6). 

Dishonest reporting

How superficial was the coverage of Campania Chef Joseph Cerniglia, 39, after his Sept. 24 suicide? Take a look at today's tangled tale on the front of Local by Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung and federal courthouse reporter Peter J. Sampson.

There was absolutely no hint in the original stories that his Fair Lawn restaurant -- which had been transformed by Chef Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" reality TV show -- was "financially troubled" or that he sold it eight days before his death. That wasn't surprising, because after the suicide, Ung and other reporters never talked to the staff, his wife or other survivors.

Did he or didn't he?


Today's piece claims Paramus restaurant operator Philip Neuman denied in an Oct. 6 interview with The Record that he had ownership ties to Campania, but I don't recall seeing that question posed to him or his denial in any story. 

In fact, Ung's own post on the Second Helpings blog the day following the Oct. 6 interview doesn't even mention he was asked about any such ties 

Read: Interview with Philip Neuman 

Is she being dishonest with readers and trying to cover up her failure and the failure of other reporters to find out why the chef jumped off the George Washington Bridge?

In the three years Ung has been reviewing restaurants and writing a Sunday column called "The Corner Table," she has shown herself to be obsessed with eating desserts, she's just gaga over celebrity chefs and she's incapable of any probative reporting about how restaurant food is grown or raised. 

Blaming a news source for her inability to get to the bottom of why the chef killed himself is a new low.


The Local section leads with a federal lawsuit by six men who claim their rights were violated when they were denied permits to carry guns. 

Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado, who wrote that L-1 story, doesn't have any Hackensack news today, nor is there anything from Teaneck or Englewood.

 -- VICTOR E. SASSON