Editors buy into Christie's fraudulent weight loss

Bergen County has started to recoup some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it is paying North Jersey Media Group for 540 parking spaces at The Record's old headquarters in Hackensack while a new Justice Center is going up on the nearby courthouse lot. 

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

For the second day in a row, The Record carries a glowing account of Governor Christie's successful weight loss, hoping readers will forget just how he got there (A-3).

After he took office in early 2010, Christie ballooned on a steady diet of beer and pizza, his favorite foods, while deflecting any media attempts to find out how much he weighed.

Then, in February, an obese, desperately unhealthy Christie -- nearly as big as one of those shore houses blown away by Sandy -- entered the hospital for secret weight-loss surgery.

He still refuses to disclose how much he weighs to The Record, which for years has ignored the GOP bully's total lack of discipline or self-control, whether at the dinner table or governing New Jersey.

Christie claims he has been working out all along, but the sad truth is only will power and a good diet leads to weight loss.

Political poison

What's the point of Staff Writer Herb Jackson's column on non-stop political ads in Virginia, and why is the column on the front page of a North Jersey newspaper (A-1)?

The only connection to the Garden State is the non-stop political columns in The Record that obscure the issues at stake in the Nov. 5 gubernatorial election.

The endless exploration of politics by Jackson and sidekick Charles Stile has poisoned coverage of the contest between Christie and state Sen. Barbara Buono, even as Trenton reporters continue to regurgitate unreliable polls. 

Cruz missile

If the federal government shuts down at midnight tonight, readers can blame The Record and all of the other media for giving prominent play and non-stop coverage to Tea Party crackpots, including the Canadian-born, half-Cuban Ted Cruz, the moronic senator from Texas (A-1).

Not a single reporter had the smarts to ask Cruz exactly how the Affordable Care Act is going to "hurt millions of Americans" or just whom is he talking about when he urged colleagues to de-fund health-care reform and come down "on the side of the American people."

I guess Cruz doesn't think the millions who will be getting health insurance for the first time are among "the American people."

Hackensack scoop

In Local today, Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza scooped other media on major Hackensack news -- two bricks dislodging from the facade of the Bristol House, one of the high-rises on Prospect Avenue (L-2).

Sforza thinks more bricks will follow, so the story notes the Bristol House is "across the street from the site of a massive parking-garage collapse three years ago."

Enough already

You have to search and search for the real story in Food Editor Esther Davidowitz's long-winded profile of Chef Steve Santoro, owner with his wife of Local Seasonal Kitchen in Ramsey (BL-1).

"People don't want grease, preservatives or hormones in their food," Santoro says.

Of course, there is no explanation from Davidowitz why The Record almost exclusively reviews restaurants that serve meat pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones, but rarely levels with readers and exposes its low-quality.

Sadly, Davidowitz isn't much of a reporter or writer:

She notes the interview took place in the dining room of Local Seasonal Kitchen "while [Santoro's] wife of 26 years, Joan, and their 19-year-old son Marco, both of whom work at LSK, wandered nearby."

"Wandered"? Is that the best the food editor can do?

One reason the profile is so agonizingly long is that no one edited it and removed all the extraneous detail or asked Davidowitz to expand on such nonsense as "wandered nearby."