Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Who needs another white male columnist?

An ambulance from Hackensack University Medical Center responded this morning to a home on Summit Avenue, near Spring Valley Avenue. The transfer of the ambulance service to the hospital from the city's Fire Department has proven to be a bad financial deal for Hackensack's property tax payers.
 
  

I blinked twice, but couldn't avoid the reality of seeing Herb Jackson's byline on a Page 1 column in The Record on Monday.

In one foolhardy move, Editor Marty Gottlieb ignored North Jersey's incredible diversity and named another white male to join the paper's four incompetent news and feature columnists -- all white males.

Jackson is the paper's so-called Washington correspondent, but readers recall his weak reporting on a variety of stories -- from Tea Party demonstrations in the capitol to last year's congressional races in North Jersey.

Lame reporting

Before the November election,  Jackson commanded so little respect he tried and failed to get an interview with Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantage, the subject of Monday's NJ/DC column.

Jackson blew it again, as today's A-2 correction of his amateurish reporting demonstrates.

It's bad enough the new column is written by a white male, ignoring all the talented women in the Woodland Park newsroom.

This from a newspaper that once had an African-American, a Hispanic and a woman writing news columns.

More politics? 

But why did Gottlieb think readers needed another column about politics after suffering through years of Charles Stile's incredibly boring Political Stile?

The rest of Monday's paper is all downhill from Jackson's nonsense, including a correction on A-2, a story about long commutes that belongs in the Road Warrior column, not on the Business page; and a Local section with Hackensack news lifted from a weekly paper (L-2).

Monday's Local also had two stories on major road closures (L-2 and L-3), but not a word about the detour at Passaic Street and Rochelle Avenue that caused major problems this afternoon.

What diversity?

You know Gottlieb is having problems appreciating  North Jersey's diversity when the first front-page story he's had about a resident from the Dominican Republic is today's A-1 report about Pedro Quezada of Passaic city, winner of the $338 million Powerball prize. 

Crossing readers again

On Friday, not Sunday, as I wrote earlier, Road Warrior John Cichowski had another column about the three-year-old crosswalk law, but he still is unable to accurately report on just what drivers are supposed to do when they encounter a pedestrian crossing the street.

A reader, concerned about Cichowski's flawed reporting on a range of issues, sent another e-mail to management, referring to the columnist as the "decoy Road Warrior":


"How sad is it that once again the decoy Road Warrior is unable to comprehend or report accurately on pedestrian fatality statistics and N.J. crosswalk statutes in his column of March 22, while also reporting about decoy cops that would be used in Teaneck to try and snare drivers who might be violating these statutes.

"What is most embarrassing is that The Record's management continually allows the decoy Road Warrior to mistakenly misrepresent the crosswalk statutes in a completely different way each time that he has unsuccessfully tried to explain these statutes to his readers in the past 3 years, even though I have repeatedly corrected the Road Warrior about his misinterpretations in various columns.

"It is interesting to note that the Road Warrior's confused reporting and advice about these crosswalk laws has definitely increased confusion about these crosswalk laws among drivers, pedestrians and readers of The Record. Who knows if this increased confusion has led to any of the increases in pedestrian deaths over the past 3 years?"

The full e-mail can be found on the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

Road Warrior crosses readers again 


12 comments:

  1. Just remember Dear Leader's philosophy--the only audience that matters is north of Route 4.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As the reelection of Barack Obama shows, the days of the white ruling class are numbered. RIP

    ReplyDelete
  3. When is the vote on you being on City Counsel?

    ReplyDelete
  4. City Council election is May 14 in Hackensack.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Apparently you think we need another white blogger.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yes. We need bloggers -- white, black and yellow -- and any other outsider willing to expose insider dealing like what I see in Hackensack.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Monday's Local also had two stories on major road closures (L-2 and L-3), but not a word about the detour at Passaic Street and Rochelle Avenue that caused major problems this afternoon.

    But did not that detour occur due to an accident Tuesday?

    Good trick to have gotten it into Monday's paper?

    ReplyDelete
  8. So if you are elected, Hacknesack will be pristine and corruption-free?

    ReplyDelete
  9. The street closure was Tuesday and it was due to an accident on Route 17, but I had no way of knowing that until I saw Wednesday's story on L-1.

    ReplyDelete
  10. LOL about Hackensack. What planet do you live on?

    ReplyDelete
  11. If I'm elected and I can get the other four council people to agree, we would earmark traffic fines and revenue from red-light cameras to paving streets or try to convince tax-exempt entities to give back to the city in lieu of taxes; we would end the practice of employees driving city owned cars home and sell those 12 to 15 vehicles; we would review the salaries of the top earners in city departments and see if they can be cut, and we'd do lots of other things with the goal of stabilizing property taxes and improving city services.

    ReplyDelete

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.