Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Gottlieb, minions putting little under tree for local readers

Slow-moving landscaping trucks are one of the biggest hazards on local streets. On Monday morning, I got stuck behind this one on Woodland Street, appropriately enough, between Palisade Avenue in Englewood and Clinton Avenue in Tenafly, a distance of more than one mile.


By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Editor Martin Gottlieb leads today's paper with another in a seemingly endless series of stories about human-bear run-ins, even though tens of thousands of readers have never seen one of the furry creatures.

On Dec. 12, Gottlieb even ran a detailed front-page story on how bears are butchered for human consumption. Gee-whiz.

Page 1 today is dominated by a sensational crime story, as it was on Monday -- one a cold case and the other the murder of a Palisades Park man in his Jersey City store (A-1).

Local news?

On the Local front today, the vast majority of readers search in vain for municipal news from their town, as they did on Monday.

Instead, four of the five stories on L-1 today are crime or court news or news about the police.

The editors are so inept they screwed up the name of the police chief in Rockaway Township, where The Record and Herald News are printed, according to an A-2 correction.

Page 1

Reporting on the poor job Governor Christie is doing in New Jersey seems to come in dribs and drabs.

Today, the front page reports that a panel he created wants to make it easier to carry a concealed weapon and speed up permits (A-1).

Speeding epidemic

Superior Court Judge Margaret M. Foti lectured a man sentenced to 6 years in prison in a road-rage death about the epidemic of speeding -- a story ignored by Road Warrior John "Wrong Way" Cichowski for more than a dozen years (L-1).

"There is no one out there driving on the roadways today who has not experienced someone speeding by at 80, 90, 100 miles per hour and to turn to the person next to you and say, 'That guy is going to kill someone.' It's frightening," Foti told Thomas Vanderwelt of Saddle Brook.

"And speed limits are there for a reason," the judge said. "They are there to save lives."

Pothole chronicles

In his ground-breaking reporting on long lines at the Motor Vehicle Commission and his annual awards for the biggest potholes, Cichowski not only has ignored speeding, but failed to uncover declining enforcement.

In November, Eye on The Record reported that the number of speeding tickets issued on the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway had dropped dramatically:

More speeding, fewer tickets

Best restaurants?

The Better Living cover on the top 10 North Jersey restaurants in 2015 contains glaring omissions (BL-1, BL-2).

Critic Elisa Ung never says whether any of the restaurants serve the kind of grass-fed or naturally raised beef, pork and lamb that would justify their high prices.

And there is not a word about the sweet, artery clogging desserts she sampled at all of them -- the kind of food most of her readers avoid like the plague.

Monday's paper

When Gottlieb or his minions put another one of Tara Sullivan's awful columns on Page 1, readers know the editors are scraping the bottom of the barrel, as they did on Monday.

Of course, Sunday is a slow-news day, but there was even more irrelevant filler inside the paper, such as car, bus or plane crash news from several states on A-3.

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