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| In Monday night's North 1, Group 4 boys basketball final in Hackensack, the Morristown High School Colonials took an early lead, above, but ultimately lost to the Hackensack High School Comets, 67-64. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
With NJ Transit rail workers threatening to strike in less than a week, Governor Christie going on vacation reminds me of the old Mose Allison song:
"Your mind is on vacation, but your mouth is working overtime."
It's bad enough Christie was more interested in running for president than in running New Jersey, where problems of his own making seem only to get worse, not better.
Or that he could care less that rail workers have been without a contract for five years, and doesn't seem interested in granting them modest raises in order to avert a strike set for 12:01 a.m. Monday.
But in covering the labor dispute, The Record of Woodland Park hasn't been able to hide the deep-seated, anti-union bias of the Borg family, owners of North Jersey Media Group's flagship paper.
Christie's last public appearance on Monday before leaving for a vacation isn't on Page 1, as it should be.
After endorsing fellow racist Donald Trump, the GOP bully recently claimed he went "back to work."
Christie's latest break from governing isn't even mentioned in the headline on A-4.
Union 'demands'
The rail workers unions are asking for an average 2.57% raise over seven years of a new contract, and for their health insurance payments to be capped at 2.5% of their base salaries (A-4).
That doesn't seem to warrant The Record reporting, "Unions have demanded ...." or quoting NJ Transit officials calling the union proposal "excessive."
Nowhere in the strike-threat coverage have you seen The Record report NJ Transit is in financial trouble and had to raise fares because Christie cut millions of dollars in state subsidies to the agency to balance his budget.
Of course, the Borgs' can hardly be called objective, and the staff seems to have gotten the message, from transportation reporter Christopher Maag to Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin.
The Borgs defeated any attempt to unionize pressmen or other workers, and in the last few years, they have denied raises to even the hardest-working newsroom staffers.
Mind on vacation
Road Warrior John Cichowski, The Record's lazy commuting columnist, would be writing about more training for teen drivers on the same day as coverage of a funeral for a 7-year-old girl killed by a hit-run driver in a crosswalk (L-1).
This week also saw the deaths of two 17-year-old boys, who were mowed down by a speeder's out-of-control car.
Cichowski's last column was about a railroad crossing.
In the more than a dozen years Cichowski has been pretending to be the paper's commuting columnist, he has ignored increased crowding on NJ Transit buses and trains; Christie's and the Port Authority's refusal to expand mass transit; and mounting traffic congestion at the Hudson River crossings.
He's also missed a dramatic decline in speeding enforcement on the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway.
