 |
| All the flag waving in The Record obscures the high tolls commuters are paying to make up for cost overruns on the long-delayed World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. |
What have long-suffering readers of The Record done to deserve three solid days of Mike Kelly, the columnist who long ago ran out of anything meaningful to say?
The hospital robot on the front page today has nothing on Kelly, who mechanically pushes words around in his column on the Local front (L-1), as he has been doing for decades.
His Page 1 column on Monday led the paper, but readers who plowed through all that verbiage weren't rewarded with any insight into the "questionable" shootings of African-Americans Trayvon Martin of Florida and Malik Williams of Garfield.
Doesn't fault media
In fact, Kelly carefully avoids mentioning the real difference between the fatal shootings -- media hysteria that forced authorities to charge the shooter in Florida compared to media indifference to the death of Williams, 19.
In fact, in the days and weeks after the Dec. 10 killing of Williams by two police officers, The Record's editors and Kelly himself failed miserably to challenge the account provided by Prosecutor John Molinelli.
Instead, the editors merely regurgitated press releases, leaving many questions unanswered, and never tried to find witnesses or the owner of the garage where Williams hid after he ran out of the Garfield police station.
Kelly also hides his involvement in a fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager -- he wrote a book about the killing of Phillip C. Pannell by a Teaneck officer in the early 1990s, an account that sided with authorities.
In his rambling Monday column, he actually had the nerve to say this about Martin's mother:
"Sybrina Fulton should not be blamed that America has focused its unwieldy and unpredictable beam of attention on the death of her 17th-year-old son."
"America"? He means the media, but is too cowardly to say so and expose his own incompetence and the laziness of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her assignment-desk flunkies.
The death of seven members of a Bronx family in a horrific accident didn't belong on Monday's front page.
Does anybody believe a statement in today's account (A-4) that the woman who was driving the minivan "may have been simply keeping up with traffic"?
The driver, Maria Gonzalez, was speeding in the fast lane at almost 20 mph over the limit. If she had survived, she would have faced vehicular homicide charges.
Gave up their cars
On Monday's L-1, a large photo shows commuters running to work now that the $12 Lincoln Tunnel toll has forced them to give up their cars.
Commuters are paying higher Hudson River tolls and fares to make up for the cost overruns on the new World Trade Center -- something that wasn't mentioned in all the flag-waving coverage on Sunday and Monday.
Local deaths
Local obituaries rarely appear on A-1, so today's story about the founder of a Polish-American weekly newspaper must be a case of professional courtesy.
We can expect two more local obituaries about the men who caught 30-pound, PCB-bloated striped bass from the Hudson River, should they decide to eat the fish (L-3 photo).
No comments:
Post a Comment
If you want your comment to appear, refrain from personal attacks on the blogger. Anonymous comments are no longer accepted. Keep your racism to yourself.