Sunday edition is offering little to those untouched by 9/11

A recent photo of The Record's former headquarters in Hackensack shows the fourth-floor newsroom windows that were filled with a column of black smoke rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, as the staff put out an extra edition and worked into the night on the next day's paper.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

True. The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center was the biggest story I and other staffers at The Record have ever worked on.

But 15 years later, the rising column of smoke I saw through big newsroom windows until night fell, and the ash-covered streets I walked near Ground Zero are but distant memories.

With a major story on nearly every section front today, The Record's Sunday edition wraps up a week of overkill -- exploring the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America from every angle imaginable.

We can only hope The Record's reporters, columnists, editors and editorial writers will return to doing something they've neglected -- putting Governor Christie's feet to the fire for more than 500 vetoes as part  of his war on the middle and working classes in New Jersey.

They should also be asking why state troopers are only now being sent to Paterson to stem the gang warfare and gun violence that has taken so many innocent lives in recent years.

Media agenda

Today's centerpiece -- "Separate stories, shared heartache" -- grows out of the demonization of Muslims by wacko racist Donald J. Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, who claims America remains vulnerable to another major terrorist attack.

In fact, Columnist Mike Kelly says, "Now, 15 years later and in the midst of a contentious presidential election ... we are still trying to stop terrorism" (A-1).

That's nonsense. In America at least, billions spent on homeland security have prevented another terror attack anywhere near the scale of 9/11.

Kelly has been so eager to claim the opposite that in June, he compared the Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub massacre of 49 people to 9/11, when 2,996 people died.

A wire service story that appeared in the paper recently lumped in last December's 14 killings in San Bernardino, Calif., with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

In his decades-long Record career, Kelly has written more about 9/11 than any other single event, and readers get the feeling he just doesn't want to let go of being involved in the biggest story of his life.

'Basket of deplorables'

A so-called Analysis from The Washington Post today makes much ado about nothing -- Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton putting "half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables'" (A-5).

She was being kind, and explained herself by noting many of Trump's followers are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it."

Who can argue with that?

9/11 and North Jersey

The most powerful element in the week-long recognition of the 15th anniversary of 9/11 is the page and a half of photos "honoring the North Jersey neighbors we lost on Sept. 11, 2001" (L-2 and L-3).

I didn't know any of them, but those faces and names tell me much more about our loss than the hundreds of thousands of words that have appeared in the Woodland Park daily in the past seven days.