The best and worst of tributes to 9/11 victims

On Tuesday night, the new World Trade Center was the focus in lower Manhattan. The lighting on the building seems incomplete and we can only hope it is temporary.

By Victor E. Sasson

Editor

Today's front-page photo in The Record shows firefighters in Wayne reverently touching a piece of steel from the World Trade Center towers that fell on Sept. 1, 2001.

A story with the photo reports that volunteers on Tuesday helped weed flower beds at the New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home in Paramus -- ahead of the Sept. 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance (A-1).

Most readers can identify with those scenes a dozen years after an attack on America destroyed the Twin Towers across the river from North Jersey, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Pigs on Hogs

Now, look at the photo on the Local front of a bunch of bearded, overweight slobs on motorcycles, members of the Renegade Pigs Motorcycle Club, entering a cemetery in North Arlington (L-1).

The photo caption says the Pigs rode Hogs into the cemetery "to pay their respects" to a fallen Port Authority police officer, a member of the club, who was killed on 9/11.

Undoubtedly, some members of the club are former police officers.

They deliberately modified their Harley-Davidson motorcycles to make them as loud as possible and disturb as many people as possible, knowing cops will give them a pass on violating anti-noise ordinances.

Don't you just love the Nazi helmets worn by many of them? What's that lone African-American doing there?

A cemetery is an appropriate setting. Their motorcycles are loud enough to wake the dead.

The Hudson Riverfront 9/11 Memorial in Weehawken was dedicated in 2011.

 

Better than sex
 

And for anyone who couldn't get a seat on a bus or train to Manhattan or who got stuck in a massive traffic jam, don't miss the earth-shaking news in today's Road Warrior column on the Local front.

Staff Writer John Cichowski -- aka "The Addled Commuter" -- continues to mine the obscure and irrelevant, and ignore the commuting mess that affects the majority.

No Cichowski column would be complete without ridiculously inappropriate quotes from his adoring fans, who get such a kick out of seeing their names in print.

"Oh, my God! It's so exciting!" one woman "gushed."

She was referring to the activation of a traffic light on South Summit Avenue in Hackensack, suggesting she hasn't had an orgasm in decades.


 

Editors wary of covering transportation on the ground

In a photo taken appropriately on April Fool's Day this year, the new World Trade Center taunts commuters who pay exorbitant Hudson River tolls to help  cover its huge cost overruns. Of course, if they try to switch to buses or trains, they won't find any rush-hour seats, thanks to the Port Authority's and Governor Christie's regressive mass-transit policies.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Is it really front-page news that Port Authority Commissioner Anthony Sartor owns and runs a large New Jersey-based engineering firm that has worked alongside some of the biggest contractors on the new World Trade Center project?

Or that as head of the bistate agency's WTC Redevelopment Subcommittee, he's bowed out of voting more than 100 times to avoid possible conflicts of interest?

Editor Marty Gottlieb of The Record thinks so, but readers are all too familiar with an agency that is packed with Governor Christie's cronies and powerful commissioners whose outside interests pose ethical dilemmas.

The coverage they haven't seen from Gottlieb and Staff Writer Shawn Boburg or any of the paper's transportation writers relates to on-the-ground commuting issues -- exorbitant and still rising tolls, and packed buses and trains.

That's all set against a background of Christie killing new rail tunnels into Manhattan, and the Port Authority refusing to expand bus or PATH service.

Page A-2 today carries the fourth correction in 2 days from The Record's hard-working editors and reporters.

Elderly drivers

Road Warrior John Cichowski and the editors continue to ignore the challenges faced by older drivers.

On head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local front today, a 71-year-old Korean-American woman tries to explain why she drove the wrong way on a one-way street, leading to a collision that killed her 84-year-old husband, who wasn't wearing a seat belt.

But the editors and their reporter didn't go far enough and explain how a 32-year-old woman in a 2012 BMW X5 couldn't avoid the head-on collision (L-1).

Was the much younger woman texting on her cellphone or speeding? Readers have no clue.

Today's column from Cichowski is yet another discussion of the 2010 law that requires drivers to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalks (L-1).

But his time would be better spent helping older drivers find refresher courses or places where they can go to learn more about defensive driving.

Got carcinogens?

On the Better Living front, doesn't that plate of burnt grilled chicken look yummy?

It's just what the doctor ordered for readers in search of more carcinogens -- harmful chemicals that form when meat and poultry are cooked over high heat.

In recent months, The Record has been publishing recipes from a bumbling food blogger, Kate Morgan Jackson of Upper Saddle River.

Here, Jackson combines chicken and buttermilk for a double dose of harmful, artery clogging animal fats, and doesn't even recommend readers use organic or antibiotic-free poultry (BL-2).

For tips on preparing healthy meals, see:

Do You Really Know What You're Eating?

Editors miss the really big picture

Commuters lining up for a 2:30 bus from Manhattan to East Brunswick, New Brunswick and Princeton on Friday. The bus was late, and many people stood in the aisle.

The Record's editors ran photos of a rotund Governor Christie with obesity fighter Michelle Obama on Friday, but it never occurred to any of them to ask what Christie or New Jersey is doing to fight the epidemic.

It is more of the same irresponsible silence the editors have maintained since Christie took office more than 2 years ago, even though he had a health scare last year and appears to be losing his own waistline battle.

" ... Christie ushered Michelle Obama with a touch on her shoulder to look through a glass pane above the 16-acre site" of the new World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Woodland Park daily reported on Friday (A-11).

Student shames editors

But a student member of The Record's own Diversity in Journalism Workshop didn't mince words elsewhere in Friday's paper:

Amanda Eisenberger, a 12th grader at Pascack Hills High School, noted that despite growing obesity in New Jersey, Christie's has ignored the issue (A-23).

" ... Where is health-care reform, especially for childhood obesity," Eisenberger said. 

The Page 1 story and photo reporting the visit of President Obama to Manhattan ran under this headline:

A break from politics

to reflect on progress

That sounds like a decent headline, but from the first paragraph the story is filled with nothing but politics.

Where was Editor Marty Gottlieb? Stuck in traffic on his commute home to Manhattan? 

Where was Production Editor Liz Houlton, supervisor of the news copy desk, which wrote that bad headline? Out shopping for another schmatta?

Hyping job growth

Elsewhere on Friday's front page and on A-3 on Saturday, stories extinguish Christie's "fire" -- exaggerated claims about job gains -- and report they are unlikely to support his proposed income-tax cuts.

Meanwhile, Road Warrior John Cichowski reported on an issue of grave concern among New Jersey commuters:

Thousands of drivers stuck in colossal traffic jams -- and thousands of other commuters standing in bus and train aisles -- have been reflecting deeply on the poor quality of license plates and wondering whether the state is doing anything about that (L-1 on Friday).

Hackensack news?

On Friday's L-5, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza ran another story on revitalization plans for downtown Hackensack.

The editors have never reported on how Main Street fared during the recession nor explored the impact of North Jersey Media Group's wholesale abandonment of its former home, where the paper prospered for more than 110 years.

And where is the story about the huge Walmart planned for NJMG land at 80 and 150 River St.?

Chocolate-covered lox?

In an appraisal of Blue Fish in Ridgewood, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung turns up her nose at healthy Mediterranean seafood entrees, apparently devoid of cream and butter (BL-18 and 19 on Friday).

In the data box, she noted the restaurant is "less appropriate for complex preparations."

In the review, she seems disappointed baked scrod was "simply adorned with lemon, garlic, white wine and olive oil," and that sea bass had "just" tomatoes, lemon, herbs and scallion. 

Ambulance chasing

Sykes and Sforza needed two large photos of non-fatal gas-line and automobile accidents to fill the Local news section today (L-2 and L-3).

A large chunk of the section front is devoted to a decidedly non-local story -- a California man who ran across the country and the George Washington Bridge (L-1).

On L-3, The Star-Ledger -- not The Record -- reports that two apparent suicide attempts on the GWB were thwarted on Thursday evening.

One of the would-be jumpers was homeless, but the other apparently was just trying to get out of the expensive lease on his BMW.

Food riot

A follow-up to Friday's story on a food fight in the Westwood High School cafeteria doesn't explore the cause (L-3).

Although it is well-known among parents and students that the food served at Hackensack High and many other high schools in Bergen County truly sucks, The Record has never published a word about it.

The Mike Kelly robot writes on and on

All the flag waving in The Record obscures the high tolls commuters are paying to make up for cost overruns on the long-delayed World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

What have long-suffering readers of The Record done to deserve three solid days of Mike Kelly, the columnist who long ago ran out of anything meaningful to say?

The hospital robot on the front page today has nothing on Kelly, who mechanically pushes words around in his column on the Local front (L-1), as he has been doing for decades.

His Page 1 column on Monday led the paper, but readers who plowed through all that verbiage weren't rewarded with any insight into the "questionable" shootings of African-Americans Trayvon Martin of Florida and Malik Williams of Garfield.

Doesn't fault media

In fact, Kelly carefully avoids mentioning the real difference between the fatal shootings -- media hysteria that forced authorities to charge the shooter in Florida compared to media indifference to the death of Williams, 19.

In fact, in the days and weeks after the Dec. 10 killing of Williams by two police officers, The Record's editors and Kelly himself failed miserably to challenge the account provided by Prosecutor John Molinelli.

Instead, the editors merely regurgitated press releases, leaving many questions unanswered, and never tried to find witnesses or the owner of the garage where Williams hid after he ran out of the Garfield police station.

Blames 'America'

Kelly also hides his involvement in a fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager -- he wrote a book about the killing of Phillip C. Pannell by a Teaneck officer in the early 1990s, an account that sided with authorities.

In his rambling Monday column, he actually had the nerve to say this about Martin's mother: 

"Sybrina Fulton should not be blamed that America has focused its unwieldy and unpredictable beam of attention on the death of her 17th-year-old son."

"America"? He means the media, but is too cowardly to say so and expose his own incompetence and the laziness of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her assignment-desk flunkies.

Speeding deaths

The death of seven members of a Bronx family in a horrific accident didn't belong on Monday's front page.

Does anybody believe a statement in today's account (A-4) that the woman who was driving the minivan "may have been simply keeping up with traffic"?

The driver, Maria Gonzalez, was speeding in the fast lane at almost 20 mph over the limit. If she had survived, she would have faced vehicular homicide charges. 

Gave up their cars

On Monday's L-1, a large photo shows commuters running to work now that the $12 Lincoln Tunnel toll has forced them to give up their cars.

Commuters are paying higher Hudson River tolls and fares to make up for the cost overruns on the new World Trade Center -- something that wasn't mentioned in all the flag-waving coverage on Sunday and Monday.

Local deaths

Local obituaries rarely appear on A-1, so today's story about the founder of a Polish-American weekly newspaper must be a case of professional courtesy.

We can expect two more local obituaries about the men who caught 30-pound, PCB-bloated striped bass from the Hudson River, should they decide to eat the fish (L-3 photo).

A four-paragraph story about scheduling in the trial of suspended Police Chief Ken Zisa (L-3) is all the Hackensack news today.

Breaking news: Dead patients don't pay

Image via Wikipedia
The New World Trade Center is over-budget and won't be finished until who knows when.

Did you see the inadvertently hilarious Page 1 quote in The Record today from Anthony Orlando, CFO at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center?


Englewood and other hospitals apparently are stiffed so much they are requiring patients to pay upfront, even in the emergency room.


"When you go to Best Buy, do you walk out without paying," Orlando asks rhetorically -- as if an operation or other medical procedure is as common as buying a flat-screen TV.


"The only chance to collect a debt, direct and face to face, is when they're [patients] here," he goes on. "You may never see them again."


Especially if they die on the operating table. In other words, dead patients don't pay, so the hospital tries to get its money while they are alive and kicking.


Editor's giant error


Thanks to interim Editor Douglas Clancy, overblown coverage of the Giants on A-1 doesn't leave much room for general-interest news besides the hospital story.


A second front-page report says North Jersey residents continue to take a bath from the Port Authority's construction of the New World Trade Center. 


It's bad enough we're all paying higher tolls, but now readers learn about the outrageous compensation being paid to members of the private 9/11 Memorial foundation.


In the Local section, a story on the miraculous recovery of an Englewood woman whose heart stopped in church on Jan. 15 doesn't say whether her relatives were asked for a credit-card imprint when she arrived at the Englewood Hospital emergency room (L-3).

Port Authority gets away with murder

Image via Wikipedia
The Port Authority refuses to fund an expansion of PATH.

The Record's relentless focus on Port Authority mismanagement, World Trade Center cost overruns and overtime hides what a lousy job it has done as the region's biggest transportation agency.


Mass-transit commuters -- abandoned long ago by Road Warrior John Cichowski -- find little solace in today's Page 1 story about billions more for the new trade center or the A-6 sidebar on all the extra pay PA workers are collecting.


Interim Editor Doug Clancy and Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes continue to give the powerful bi-state agency a pass on its failure to expand the PATH system or add a second reverse bus lane into the Lincoln Tunnel.


Doing double takes


Meanwhile, Sykes' local-news report continues to disappoint. 


The editor is so desperate to fill space in her section -- misnamed "Local" -- she has reporters write long, detailed previews and then cover the event, ensuring the same story appears in the paper twice and fills a maximum amount of space.


Today, for example, Sykes leads her section with another in a long, tedious series of stories on legal maneuvering in a criminal case against suspended Hackesnack Police Chief Ken Zisa. The preview ran Dec. 3.


Giving us a break


Better Living breaks new ground today, publishing recipes that contain no artery clogging butter or heavy cream. 


In fact, the dessert-obsessed restaurant reviewer, Elisa Ung, breaks her own new ground with a story on an Italian feast of seven fishes (F-1 and F-8). 


Cookies play a minor role in the meal and in her report.

More words, but not always the right ones

Image via Wikipedia

Artist's conception of the new World Trade Center.

The Record's overwhelming coverage of 9/11 in the Sunday paper is followed today by more overwhelming coverage of the 10th anniversary of the attack on America.


The top half of Page 1 carries an unusually large photo of one of the memorial pools and victims' names under a headline shaped from a few eloquent words: "Sorrow etched in stone."


Though well-written, the headline isn't accurate. 


The victims' names are carved in bronze -- not stone -- as noted in both the A-1 story and photo caption.


Only two stories appear under the photo, and if you compare them, Staff Writer Shawn Boburg's well-written news reports puts to shame Columnist Mike Kelly's trite, gimmick-filled column.


Boburg's first paragraph describes a "reborn World Trade Center ... and the transformation of a place that for a decade spoke of horror and destruction," while Kelly's lead seems to be delivering a weather report:

"NEW YORK -- Once again, it was a perfect morning, with a golden dawn streaking through Manhattan's canyons and a quiet seamless azure sky overhead like a protective canopy."

His second paragraph mentions "the threat of another attack scratching at our collective fear." 


Scratching???? I stopped reading there.


Kelly puts his foot in his mouth so often, he must be a favorite of Editors Francis Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, who seem to care nothing about the poor reader who has to plow through his turgid prose.


Most of Sykes' Local section is filled with coverage of 9/11 ceremonies closer to home -- 36 of them.


Then, readers are jolted by a story on L-7 about drunk Jets football fans tailgating at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford and waving American flags.


Why is this in the local-news section, and why is it juxtaposed with all that 9/11 coverage?


The story -- from Staff Writer John Brennan -- includes two uses of the phrase "just like usual."