Editorial is weeks overdue

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 Nearly four weeks after a massive earthquake hit Haiti, the editorial page of The Record of Woodland Park condemns "a vacuum of authority [that] is encouraging chaos and slowing the flow of supplies needed to prevent more deaths."

But this was evident weeks ago. Why did Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin finally turn away from preening in front of a mirror and focus on the humanitarian crisis in Haiti?

The editorial appears now, because the newspaper -- after much hesitation -- sent two staffers there, and several paragraphs on Page O-2 today are devoted to what they reported. Does The Record really care about Haiti or is it interested only in promoting its feeble news coverage?

Let's hear the voice of the people

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People often achieve far more eloquence than many journalists can muster, but newspapers like The Record of Woodland Park don't give enough voice to them, as today's paper shows.

Nearly a week after the quake struck Haiti, a wire service reporter finally quotes a 71-year-old woman who goes to the heart of the matter: "The government is a joke," the dying woman says in a Page 1 story. "The U.N. is a joke." Buried inside Better Living today, on Page F-3, North Jersey residents are asked who ages faster, men or women? The discussion is revealing, and should been have displayed far more prominently. One man said: "Men! Because of women."

But what does The Record give us? Tired editorial writers, columnists such as Mike Kelly, John Cichowski and Bill Ervolino, and front-page coverage of sports. Ervolino today shows what he does best, his "Real Jersey" series, where he returns to his role as a reporter at North Jersey locales and draws people out on age and other questions. I would have been far more interested in seeing that on the front page than coverage of the Jets playoff chances.

Continuing coverage of Haiti and a staff-written piece on the race debate in North Jersey takes up the rest of Page 1 -- serving as a counterpoint to the diminishing amount of local news about communities such as Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, among the most diverse in The Record's circulation area.

This is, after all, the paper that got rid of its only black columnist and its only Hispanic columnist. This is, after all, the paper that devoted hundreds of hours of staff time to series on drug dealing and prostitution in Paterson, and now runs numerous stories about the Silk City's municipal affairs in its single daily edition, because its Bergen staff of lazy, incompetent assignment editors, such as Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, and its reporters produce so little news.

Haiti coverage in The Record has avoided any mention of the hundreds of Cuban doctors who were working in the impoverished nation before the quake hit or the aid the communist government sent since the disaster. This is what you'd expect from a paper that used to assign Castro-hating Cuban exiles to cover its occasional story about the Caribbean's biggest island, ignoring moderate views among the large number of exiles in North Jersey.

Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale always defended the paper's slanted coverage of  the island. Was it because the newsroom had so few Spanish-speaking staffers or because he was hen-pecked by his Cuban wife?

And do we need the two long, detailed, staff-written stories on A-8 today about North Jerseyans who were in  Haiti and returned home safely? A few paragraphs on each would have sufficed.

Desperate for a real newspaper

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The earthquake survivors in Haiti are desperate for relief, according to the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but I'm just desperate for a newspaper that has the balls to go to bat for people who have been ignored by the world for far too long.

You won't find anything in today's disaster coverage -- not even an editorial -- expressing outrage at the failure of government in Haiti, at the collapse of law and order, at the slowness of the rescue effort and at the realization the world may have allowed this Caribbean nation to descend so far, it may be beyond help without a truly massive, unprecedented infusion of aid. But how many Haitians will this neglect have killed?

(Similarly, the Borgs may wake up one day and actually read the paper, only to realize too late that the lazy, incompetent editors have run it into the ground so deep, it can't be saved.)

The absolute failure of government quickly became evident only a day or two after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but The Record was unwilling to go out on a journalistic limb to say so. It waited -- for an "expert," a story from one of its wire services, anything to avoid its own responsibility to report what a poor job the Bush administration was doing to help one of the nation's greatest cities.

We're seeing the same thing with the earthquake in Haiti. Look at the nonsense from Columnist Mike Kelly (see yesterday's posts). Where is an editorial criticizing the Haitian government and its greedy ruling class? Where is the editorial on how little the world community has done for Haiti in the last few decades?

If ever there was an argument for busing students to school, look at the story on the front of the Local section about a teen driver who manages to hit a tree -- cutting the car in half -- and nearly kill himself and his sister. Does anybody believe he wasn't speeding? Why was the reporter, Marlene Naanes, able to get his sister's name, but not his? What is a story about Giants Stadium memorabilia doing on the Local front?

Reporter Monsy Alvarado's byline on a Hackensack story appears for the first time since Dec. 30, with another detailed piece on disciplinary hearings for police officers who are suing the chief. This is a subject she has reported far more than any other, ignoring schools, development, the City Council and  municipal government. There is no news of Teaneck or Englewood, two other premier towns in Bergen County. Between Dec. 20 and today, only one Englewood story has appeared in the paper, outside of police and fire news.

The restaurant review today, in the centerfold of Better Living, is written by food editor Bill Pitcher, whose sudden visibility is welcome now that Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung is on leave until summer. Pitcher's familiarity with fresh fish, in this review of a Greek restaurant, is a revelation, compared to Ung's constantly obsessing about dessert. But why run a photo of  "overcooked and flat-tasting" grilled shrimp and a second one of the owner holding that dish?

There is an unusually long list of restaurant sanitary inspections on Page 24 of Better Living today, but what about Wyckoff and other towns that never appear? And is it really fair to readers to run a long story on the next page supposedly containing "facts" about antibiotics in poultry and other issues written by the National Chicken Council, an industry promotional group?