Reporters display abysmal ignorance of their N.J. beats

The window of a Syrian wedding store in South Paterson, a bustling district of Christian- and Muslim-owned businesses along Main Street in Paterson that draws shoppers from hundreds of miles around, below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Nine long days after Governor Christie blasted President Obama's plan to accept Syrian refugees -- even orphans -- The Record's newsroom finally moved into action.

An assignment editor in Woodland Park shook the sleep out of her eyes on Tuesday, and told a reporter to interview merchants who have been prospering for decades in the next town -- Syrians who condemn ISIS (A-1).

"Syrians are business people. They have nothing to do with bombs," Paterson bakery owner Mohamed Souda, a Syrian immigrant, told Staff Writer Hannan Adely.

"Whoever goes against refugees, those people are absolutely wrong."

Why did it take so long after Christie's hate mongering for an editor to assign Adely to this important story?

South Paterson

Gathering reaction in South Paterson, an economic bedrock of Silk City for many decades, should have been the first story the editors assigned after the Paris attacks and the backlash from Christie and other mean-spirited Republicans.

Of course, local assignment editors like Deirdre Sykes, Dan Sforza and Tim Nostrand have been at their jobs for decades, and their ignorance, laziness and general incompetence define news gathering at The Record.

And what can you say for reporters like Adely who know their beat, yet wait for a moron like Sforza to tell them what story to report and write.

All of them work under the direction of Editor Martin Gottlieb, an arrogant Manhattanite whose international credentials should have disqualified him from the job of running the newsroom of a local daily paper.

Syrian Jews

Even today's story on South Paterson and Syrians in New Jersey is deeply flawed, because their is no mention of the thousands of Syrian Jews who live in the state and who are united with Christians and Muslim by their love of Syrian food.

This Syrian Jew has shopped for decades at Fattal's, Nouri's and other stores in South Paterson, and I have met many of the law-abiding Syrian Christians and Muslims who run bakeries, restaurants and other businesses there.

Another building was under construction on Main Street in Paterson's South Paterson Commercial District in September.

Traffic bottlenecks

Staff Writer John Cichowski has been boring readers to tears with the Road Warrior column he's been writing for more than 12 years, not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of errors he has made.

Could today's so-called commuting column be the first to actually acknowledge that North Jersey has some of the worst traffic bottlenecks in America, including the Lincoln Tunnel (L-1)?

Cichowski's head must have been stuck up his enormous asshole for all the years North Jersey drivers have been mired in daily traffic nightmares, whether at the Hudson River crossings or on narrow, antiquated local streets.

A transportation reporter like Cichowski shouldn't need a survey on traffic bottlenecks to tell him there is not enough mass transit in Christie's New Jersey to take drivers off of the road.

And the hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity, waste of gasoline and aggravated air pollution isn't news to his readers.

The only "debate" over raising the gasoline tax to finance road and bridge repairs, and improve mass transit -- the way it has been done for decades -- is the one Cichowski and other burned-out reporters and editors  manufacturer to get people to read their trashy, irresponsible journalism.