Christie screws N.J. middle class in bid for White House

Some tenants of the so-called luxury Avalon Hackensack at Riverside apartments near Route 4 have been worried about their safety since a fast-moving fire in January destroyed a similar Avalon complex in Edgewater, where the same cheap, lightweight wood construction was used. One-bedroom apartments start at $2,180.

Hackensack tenants have an excellent view of The Shops at Riverside parking garage on one side and the parking lot of the Home Depot Shopping Center on the other. A long, zigzag ramp gives tenants access to Home Depot, Lotus Cafe and other businesses.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The Record's front page today reports Governor Christie's shameless cuts to the state pension system and its mass-transit agency -- two pillars of the middle class.

How did reporters like Charles Stile and Melissa Hayes, Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin and Editor Martin Gottlieb ever lend credence to the GOP bully's White House aspirations with a dismal record that stretches back to 2010, his first year in office?

Now, NJ Transit commuters are screaming about higher fares and reduced service, and public-workers unions are suing Christie for cutting more than $1 billion from a payment and violating his own pension-reform law (A-1).  

Self-serve gas

How did The Record's upbeat story on the likely end of self-serve gas get it so wrong?

For Monday's A-1 story, Staff Writer Richard Newman talked to everyone except Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who is quoted today as saying full service is here to stay (A-1 and A-3).

"As the leader of the Senate, Sweeney can block the bill," Newman reports today -- belatedly. "We just don't post it for a vote," the former union leader said.

Animal v. human news

Record Editor Martin Gottlieb continues to devote good parts of Page 1 and the Local front to animal news, but remarkable humans often get the cold shoulder.

See L-6 today for the obituary of Mark Samitt, a Woodcliff Lake resident who died of melanoma at 52. 

I guess there wasn't room on the Local front today to report that as he battled the disease, Samitt enlisted hair stylists in a potentially life-saving awareness campaign.

Bored teens

I've never seen a photo showing teen apathy better than the one on the Local front today (L-1).

If these kids are our future, look out.

An FBI analyst is shown speaking to students in Hackensack, warning them of Islamic State recruitment techniques, but most are so bored and uninterested they aren't even looking at him.

Self-serve gasoline could be bad for air quality in N.J.

This two-pump gas station on Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs will probably never convert to self-service, even if the law is changed to allow it.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The Record's front-page story on a proposal to allow self-serve gas stations in New Jersey raises a lot of questions about prices that are never answered.

The story claims drivers pay a "full-service premium ... at the pump" estimated "at 8 cents to 18 cents a gallon," but doesn't say whether prices will be cut, if self-serve is approved (A-6).

Nor does The Record say how much the gasoline tax might be raised, and whether the net effect will be lower prices at the pump.

Cutting gasoline prices would transform a quality of life report into an environmental story, if lower prices encourage more driving and discourage the purchase of hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars.

Of course, the New Jersey Gasoline C-Store Automotive Association probably wouldn't pass along labor savings to the consumer.

Members of the owners group have been charged with numerous wage violations.

Confusing numbers

At one point, the story reports self-serve pumps "would mean the loss of hundreds of part-time jobs," but a few paragraphs later notes gas stations employ about 5,000 attendants who pump gas, most of them part time (A-6).

Today's lead story on A-1 reports air pollution is getting worse in New Jersey. 

A proposal that might lead to lower gas prices and encourage more driving certainly isn't welcome in the Garden State, where mass transit is already operating at capacity.

Letterman effect

If the page proofer, news and copy editors, and other members of the newsroom production staff are still watching David Letterman, readers might finally have an explanation for the dramatic spike in errors in recent years (BL-1).

Letterman's "Late Show" was a fixture in the newsroom before the Borg family's North Jersey Media Group abandoned Hackensack in 2009.

Even more significant, moving the printing of The Record to Rockaway Township from Hackensack a couple of years earlier apparently ended the tradition of checking the first copies for errors, stopping the presses and fixing them.

Six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton has done a miserable job of ensuring accurate headlines, and all editing seems to have ended, allowing reporters and columnists to write on and on, and spin fiction if they want.

All this coverage -- today and Sunday -- of Letterman's final show on Wednesday is a waste of space. 

After I left the paper, I never watched the comedian again.

Second looks

Take a look at the corrections on Saturday's A-2 for examples of what a crappy job Houlton and the news and copy editors under her are doing.

One headline "gave the incorrect town in which seven people face prostitution-related charges."

Another correction fixed the misspelling of a Bergen County official's name, but also gave the name of his agency incorrectly.

Adam Strobel was identified as "division director for open space." The division isn't named.

The Strobel correction noted the "impact" of raising the open-space tax also was wrong in a story on Friday's L-6.

Death Valley

Sunday's Travel section cover story on California's Death Valley National Park was beautifully written by Staff Writer Lindy Washburn, the paper's chief medical reporter.

Her description of the landscape and "a silence as immense as any on earth" makes me want to visit even more than I did before (T-1).