7 other N.J. newspapers hounded Christie 'back to work'

Light snowfall didn't slow the collection of garbage and recycling in Hackensack today.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Governor Christie pledged to get "back to work" on New Jersey's most insoluble problems, but you won't find any mention in The Record today of the role played by seven other newspapers that demanded his resignation.

In the first paragraph of a Page 1 news story, Trenton reporter Dustin Racioppi refers vaguely to "demands," and then focuses on an "intense and scathing" online reaction to Christie's endorsement of racist Donald Trump (A-1).

Still, even in his longest press conference in two years, Christie successfully "managed" Racioppi and Record Columnist Charles Stile, who wrote another boring political column on the GOP bully's ties to the "party establishment" (A-4).

Neither Racioppi nor Stile asked whether Christie intends to continue to rule by veto, as he's done more than 500 times since early 2010.

Nor will you find any mention in today's upbeat editorial of Christie's war on the working and middle classes in the state (A-10).

This week, six Gannett-owned newspapers in New Jersey, followed by The Star-Ledger, the state's biggest daily, called on our absentee governor to resign after sacrificing his duties to his personal ambitions on the presidential campaign trail.

The Record of Woodland Park has never mentioned those editorials or its own waffling on Christie's dereliction of duty. 

Rail confusion

Today's lead story on a potential NJ Transit rail strike on March 13 is so poorly edited readers are confronted with contradictory numbers on how many commuters will be affected (A-1).

A graphic just below the headline shows an average of 308,523 one-way weekday rail trips, but next to it, a sub-headline says only 65,000 may be "stranded" by a strike.

In the text, the 65,000 number turns out to be referring only to people who ride trains into Manhattan, ignoring others who take trains within the Garden State.

And the long story by Staff Writer Christopher Maag contains absolutely no information on what the 4,200 rail workers are asking for, preventing readers from judging the merits of the unions' position.

Maag does say rail employees have been working without a contract for five years, more evidence that Christie is an enemy of both mass transit and unions. 

'Lasuni gobi'

On the Better Living cover today, a photo of "lasuni gobi," a dish at Kinara in Tenafly, gives no hint of whether it is meat, poultry or vegetable.

Ditto for the caption on BL-2, and the data box that appears with Elisa Ung's upbeat review of the Indian restaurant on BL-14.

Finally, in the penultimate paragraph of the review itself, readers learn this great looking Chinese-Indian dish is fried florets of cauliflower "in a dark garlic sauce."

The sugar-, butter- and cream-obsessed Ung apparently withheld a third star, because "the dessert menu is full of duds."

Still, how can she rate the place Good to Excellent after calling the samosas the "worst" appetizer and the tandori chicken "flavorless"?