Let's study this further -- and this, too

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The Lincoln Tunnel helix circa 1955. In the past 20 years, the Port Authority has refused to add a second reverse lane to boost the number of buses into Manhattan and give more drivers faced with high tolls a less expensive way to commute to their jobs.

Two of the three major stories on Page 1 of The Record today are based on studies, and the third is a he said/she said on oil drilling off Delaware and Virginia -- making for another edition that's as dreary as the weather.


The clunky headlines on the lead story -- elevated cancer rates in DuPont-polluted Pompton Lakes -- should have said the higher number is for women.


How many of these matter-of-fact recitations, masquerading as news stories out of Pompton Lakes, does Editor Francis Scandale expect readers to take?


The Passaic County town isn't that far from a community that was polluted by another corporate giant, Ford Motor Co., so why not compare how predominantly white Pompton residents have fared compared to the mixed-race residents of Upper Ringwood.


Oh, there's no study on that? Never mind.


Another big screw-up


After a week when the stock markets went wild and the world economy seemed on the verge of collapse, the paper notes on Page A-2 today that its Money and Markets report was incorrect.


If you doubt the assignment editors working under the burden of Editor Deirdre Sykes are the laziest east of the Rocky Mountains, look at today's Local section, which is devoid of any municipal news from Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, as well as many other major towns.


Palookaville


Port Authority reporter Shawn Boburg continues to gloss over the bi-state agency's historic lack of commitment to mass transit (L-2). 


Harvy Lipman, the non-profit reporter hired at the direction of Publisher Stephen A. Borg, appears to be averaging one story a week (L-3).


In Better Living, an Associated Press recipe on Page F-3 suggests ruining a perfectly healthy tomato with sausage meat, butter and "torn stale bread."


Sounds yummy.

Christie is The Record's sacred cow

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The Record today has a long, gripping tale on legal fees from a lawsuit against The Prudential Insurance Company of America.

Staff Writer Jeff Pillets is one of The Record's best reporters, so you have to wonder why he and his many bosses aren't looking into Governor Christie -- a former federal prosecutor -- failing to "reform" the outrageous pay and benefits of hundreds of police chiefs in the state (A-1).

In decades of reporting on air traffic over North Jersey, today's story on A-3 is the first time I have seen anyone quoted as saying the noise holds the "potential for a decrease in home values." Something to think about the next time you challenge your assessment.

Stupid headline 

Ten letters to the editor support, even cheer the placement of solar panels on utility poles (A-11), despite a March 27 story on the Local front that carried the idiotic headline, "Clean energy's ugly side."

You have to pity the 113 plaintiffs who have been barred from the latest lawsuit against DuPont in Pompton Lakes  -- a decades-long fiasco of corporate and government inaction.

 

But the story on L-1 today fails to explore whether they got bad legal advice or were lulled into a false sense of security by the polluter's assurances on remediation of cancer-causing solvents in contaminated groundwater. 

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Reporter Kibret Markos can be found smoking outside the courthouse.

Past her bedtime

Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado writes about Saturday classes at the Middle and 5ive6ix schools (L-1) a few days after ignoring a Board of Education meeting that went past midnight as officials deliberated the budget and weighed record layoffs.

Bergen County Courthouse reporter Kibret Markos misses so many North Jersey stories, you have to wonder why he and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes are wasting readers' time with a long L-6 story on a dispute over legal fees involving a Baltimore lawyer, a North Carolina bank and The Prudential Insurance Co. 

Markos violates widely accepted standards of reporting in a second story today about a lawyer who stole nearly $540,000 of his clients' money (L-3). 

Sykes should be ashamed of herself for not striking the words "mentally ill" from a description of the lawyer's ex-wife, who has absolutely nothing to do with the thefts.

Where the hell is the copy desk?

We give you The Passaic Record

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When there was more than one edition of The Record of Woodland Park, Bergen County residents might think a paper with a lot of Passaic news -- like today's -- was delivered to them by mistake. But today's Passaic-centric edition is no mistake. With the local Bergen editors off in La-La Land, this single edition is all the desperate weekend staff could come up with.

For those subscribers who still call the paper The Bergen Record, here is The Passaic Record.


The front page needs not one but two filler wire-service stories to supplement the main North Jersey element -- more on DuPont pollution in Pompton Lakes (map). One of them, a doomsday AP piece on Social Security payouts and revenue during the recession, omits any information about the system's huge reserves. No attempt was made to localize either wire story.

The Pompton Lake clean-up story appears to be of wide interest -- this lake serves as backup to reservoirs that supply drinking water to many North Jersey towns-- but the focus is on technical aspects of removing soil. My eyes glazed over. Could this story get any more boring? 

At the same time, the reporter never answers the question of whether mercury has tainted drinking water in those reservoirs.

It's bad enough North Jersey Media Group and other companies stampeded hundreds of thousands of workers into early retiement, but why is its flagship paper leading today's edition with a Social Security story that amounts to a fraud? Reserves of $2.5 trillion -- that's right, trillion -- plus payroll taxes are expected to cover full payment of benefits for 33 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The front of Local is filled with more Passaic County news -- from Wayne, Clifton, and Woodland Park. Inside, you won't find any news of Hackensack, Teaneck or the 'Woods (Englewood, Westwood, Wood-Ridge and Ridgewood), but you will find a story from Ringwood.

Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale lives in Glen Rock and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes lives in Harrington Park. You'd think they could get more Bergen County news into the paper, wouldn't you?

On days like this, the Passaic County bias is so blatant, it must have to do with more than the move of NJMG and The Record newsroom to Woodland Park, and the move of daily newspaper printing to Rockaway Township.


Just about the only Bergen thing left at the old Bergen Record is Old Man Borg slowly walking the empty hallways of the former headquarters at 150 River St., Hackensack. He's probably muttering to himself, What the f--- did my two spoiled brats do to my beloved paper?

How about some background?

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Don't you hate it when a front-page story is not only poorly reported and edited but provides you with only the barest of background? You have that today in The Record of Woodland Park with another in a series about the long-suffering residents of Pompton Lakes. (Photo: A front page from 2007 for comparison.)

Why this story is on Page 1 is a puzzle. Why it doesn't portray this sorry saga of chemical pollution as both a shameful corporate and home-rule failure is only known to the lazy, desperate and incompetent editors who think Bergen County readers are eager for another update on this century old story in a far-off town.

The story says a DuPont munitions plant closed in 1994, but doesn't explain why a cleanup won't be finished until 2015. That's more than 20 years. And it's unclear -- even after a careful reading -- who came up with the idea of building a wind farm next to contaminated homes, where residents would get to trade one form of pollution for another (toxic chemicals for noise and vibration)?

At least the editors had the sense to put Governor Christie's budget problems and possible solutions on the front page for a third day in a row.

If you live in Hackensack, you'll find Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado, who is supposed to cover the city, missing in action for yet another day. There are more than 10 court, lawsuit, police and fire news stories in Local today.

The editors in Business decided one lavishly promotional story about 3-D TVs wasn't enough, so they assigned a reporter to write another for today.

Try another newspaper

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If you live in Hackensack, Teaneck or one of the other important Bergen County towns, you won't find any local news in The Record of Woodland Park today. Maybe you should start subscribing to a weekly.

Much of Page 1 is devoted to a "plume of contamination" in far off Pompton Lakes, the second day in a row the story has been on the front page.

In the Local section, police, fire, weather and Haitian relief news is all you'll see from a handful of towns. For yet another day, Hackensack residents lose out. Development news? Education news? Municipal news? Environmental news? Nada, zero, zilch.

You have Frank Scandale, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, Dan Sforza and all the other lazy, incompetent editors to thank for that.