It's Christie's way or the highway -- not the bridge

Governor Christie is weathering a storm over closure of two of the three access lanes to the upper level of the George Washington Bridge, above. Haven't New Jersey's elected officials always used asphalt and traffic for political purposes? In some Hackensack neighborhoods, many streets have remained unpaved for years, even decades.

Are these the traffic cones Christie once joked he had set up to close Fort Lee's bridge access lanes? Why don't police dust them for his fingerprints?

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

The planning, execution, cover-up and public-apology phases of the Bridgegate lane blockages have passed.

After Governor Christie took a powder to Florida, his allies went on the attack, questioning the motives of the Democratic state lawmaker who has led the investigation (The Record's A-1).

For the first time in 12 days, the Woodland Park daily's front page is dominated by other news -- a column on the teams going to the Super Bowl and a woefully incomplete story on the tragic death of a young Hispanic couple whose bodies were found in a garaged car (A-1).

Come on!

I glanced at the main headline on the front of the Sports section today, and found use of the word "come" in the big headline to be suspect (S-1).

And readers continue to be astounded by how little information Record reporters get from law-enforcement sources investigating suspicious or accidental deaths (A-1 and A-6).

Both Jorge E. Rodriguez, 24, of Garfield and Melissa A. Pereira, 25, of Wayne lived with their parents, so isn't it plausible they used a car in the garage of the woman's home for privacy?

Was the garage open or closed when their bodies were found? Was the car running inside the garage?

Why didn't The Record ask these and other questions instead of basing the story on an e-mail from Passaic County's chief assistant prosecutor?

GOP on the attack

This morning, I heard former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, demanding the recusal of state Assemblyman John Wisniewski, chairman of the panel probing closure of two of three Fort Lee access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in early September (A-1).

Giuliani claims Wisniewski is not impartial and has already said he doesn't believe Christie's version of events, including that he was blindsided by a close aid and cronies on the Port Authority. 

But Wisniewski isn't a judge, Christie hasn't been accused of any crime and the GOP bully hasn't even been subpoenaed.

Incredible claims

Of course, the lawmaker isn't the only one who doesn't find credible Christie's claim of being a victim.

The governor has been throwing his weight around since he took office in January 2010 -- from the racist dismissal of the state Supreme Court's only black justice to enacting his mean-spirited policies with intimidation, threats and vetoes.

Christie's "Reform Agenda," "Jersey Comeback" and "Partisan Compromise" have been thinly disguised battles in his war on the middle and working classes.

And critics can argue that Christie has ignored mass-transit improvements and used mounting traffic congestion as a way to suppress votes.

A recent study found people exhausted by their long commutes tend not to get involved in civic affairs or go to the polls.

In fact, the turnout in the Nov. 5 election that gave Christie a second term was the lowest of any gubernatorial election in state history.

Hits Democrats

So, isn't it plausible that during the campaign, Christie would retaliate against the Democratic mayors of Fort Lee -- home of the bridge -- Jersey City and Hoboken for not endorsing his reelection?

And that in Fort Lee, the natural way to do that was to cause gridlock in a borough that historically has co-existed uncomfortably with one of the world's busiest spans?

Cuckoo chefs

The Better Living cover features professional chefs urging home cooks to make chicken stock and basil pesto from scratch (BL-1 and BL-3).

If you make that a habit, when will you have time to earn a living? 

And with organic chicken stock and fragrant basil pesto available at Costco Wholesale, why would anyone in their right mind make them at home?
  

More news of animals than inner-city kids

The Record of Woodland Park went unread last Monday, when Hackensack City Hall was closed for a federal holiday. The paper thrived in the city for more than 110 years.




Did you enjoy all those photos of beaming inner-city schoolchildren with books on Page 1 and A-8 of The Record on Sunday?

More minority children appeared on Sunday's Local front with a local obit for Kathleen Barbetta,  who taught first-graders in the city of Passaic for 24 years.

Minority schoolchildren in Passaic, Englewood, Paterson and other communities appear so infrequently in The Record you'd think they're an endangered species instead of being in the majority.

But head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, seem to knock themselves out covering animal news.


Hibernating editors

Last Monday, a huge patch of Page 1 was devoted to birds and the humans who stalk them with binoculars.

Then, the Local front of the same newspaper had a story about local bird-watchers taking part in a bird count in wealthy Englewood, where nearly all of the public schoolchildren are black and Hispanic.

This past Thursday, two photos of a Shih Tzu (SHITS-ooo) appeared on L-2, but Englewood and Hackensack readers couldn't find any news of their communities. 

And on the Local front today, Orthodox Jewish children in Passaic city -- not minority school kids -- are shown dressed as pandas, though the photo caption doesn't explain what that has to do with the Purim holiday (L-1).

Idiotic sports news

Editor Marty Gottlieb and sports Columnist Tara Sullivan again wasted readers time with Sunday's front page musings on how little we supposedly know about our "idols," a reference to athletes who kill or cheat.

Did anybody with a shred of intelligence ever "idolize" O.J. Simpson, Lance Armstrong or Oscar Pistorius?

P.R. ploy

The only reason the story of Paterson minority kids led the Sunday paper is that the book-drive sponsors were North Jersey Media Group, The Record and Herald News.

Even with that, The Record published an incorrect "end date" for the collection of books at the Ridgewood Library on A-1 both Thursday and Friday, according to an L-2 notice to readers on Sunday.

Maybe six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton can't read.

Mind on vacation

Also on Sunday, Road Warrior John Cichowski, the so-called commuting columnist, continued to ignore North Jersey's crowded highways and dysfunctional mass transit to focus on car dealers in California (L-1).

Next week, he'll be reporting on the practices of dealers in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, the biggest news in Hackensack on Sunday was a photo of a pedestrian who was struck by a "vehicle" the day before (L-2).

Today's paper

The Record's Sunday night deadline apparently was too early to get a photo of Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence on the front page today (A-1).

Another correction appears on L-2 today.

If anyone found anything of interest in the A-section, Local or Better Living, please e-mail me. Sports went straight to recycling.

Improved local news? Fuggedaboutit!

Ex-President Bill Clinton in 2007. At the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, Clinton rightly blamed the GOP for the mess we're in. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Readers searching for local news found a new section in The Record today -- edited by Alan Finder, a 28-year veteran of The New York Times.

Editor Marty Gottlieb -- himself a Times veteran -- has decided after little more than seven months in the job that what the Woodland Park daily needs most is a new weekly feature section with a puzzling name: Signature.

Gottlieb apparently is not about to tussle with head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, a 300-pounder who has threatened to sit on him if he tries to improve the Local news section she runs so ineptly.

What does the new section's name mean to you? 

"Defining life in North Jersey" are the words appearing under Signature on the cover of the  section, called "Section SIG."

Two times zero

Gee. What North Jersey readers really need is not a couple of former Times editors trying to define residents' lives, but more -- much more -- reporting on what kind of job the officials of their towns are doing.

In North Jersey -- dominated by parochial home-rule governments -- readers want a lot more information about efforts to eliminate all the waste and duplication supported by some of the highest property taxes in the nation.

Instead, Gottlieb and Finder have given us a feel-good section that largely duplicate columns and news stories that have already appeared in the paper.

Kelly and Ervolino

On the cover, Columnist Mike Kelly shows how a journalist can turn the tragedy of 9/11 into a career -- with his umpteenth tear-jerking column on the destruction of the Twin Towers.

On SIG-2, Bill Ervolino -- the unfunniest man in journalism -- wallows in nostalgia with a Then & Now column -- this on the Paramus Drive-In Theater, now a parking lot. Wow.

Another sugar high

On SIG-4, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung wrote a special column on a German bakery in Ridgewood, sure to be lapped up by all the diabetics and weight watchers in her audience.

In the first paragraph, Ung recalls her two months in Germany, stuffing her face with baked goods, and afternoon coffee and cake. Inspirational.

Local are yokels

Readers hungry for local news find little solace today.

In Local's 6 pages, readers find an astounding 16 Law & Order stories from Sykes and Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza.

Only two stories in the section can be called municipal news -- both from Passaic County. 

A third story is about a new after-school choir in Englewood.

The choir members, children 9 to 14, are expected to praise the Lord for their overwhelmingly minority schools and all of the minority employees laid off by the largely white school board.

In Business, a new hotel expected to be ready for fans attending the 2014 Super Bowl in the Meadowlands will have extra-large toilets to accommodate those notorious over-eaters and drinkers.

On today's front page, Gottlieb gave more space to the inept Giants than to former President Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Now, it's readers who are throwing up over Gottlieb's predictable Page 1 treatment of sports.

Choking readers with sports and politics

The polluted Hudson River continues to lure swimmers and hundreds of athletes suffering from sun stroke.

The editor of North Jersey's hometown daily newspaper keeps ramming sports and politics down the throats of Page 1 readers.

Today and Saturday, Editor Marty Gottlieb devoted a huge part of The Record's front page to the Stupidman U.S. Championship -- 2,500 athletes who don't known enough to stay out of the hot sun or avoid the polluted Hudson River.

Sure enough, one unidentified 43-year-old swimmer died, probably succumbing to PCB poisoning. Today's front page headline trumpets:

Heroics marred by death

How did a bunch of athletes become heroes?

If two days of Page 1 sports had readers furiously flipping through pages, the ultimate turnoff came today with nothing but state and national politics on the rest of A-1.

Horse's asses

Desperate to make the presidential contest a horse race or risk losing even more readers, Gottlieb leads the paper today with Mitt Romney's choice for a running mate to help the gazillionaire wage the GOP's war on the middle class (A-1, A-6 and A-7).

Good luck finding the continuation of the A-1 Romney story.

The famously dysfunctional news copy desk under Production Editor Liz Houlton lists the jump page as L-6 in the Local news section, instead of A-6. 

Rimbach sighting

Readers who flee to Local find the rare byline of Staff Writer Jean Rimbach, who apparently filled the role of police reporter on Saturday (L-1, L-3 and A-4).

Rimbach, a pal of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, had more bylines in today's paper than in all of the past six months.

One of Rimbach's stories today reported how an allegedly drunken driver and devoted reader of the Road Warrior column was injured by an NJ Transit train (L-1).

The woman, Danielle King, told police she has read nothing about commuting by mass transit in the Road Warrior column for years and assumed NJ Transit rail service had been discontinued.

King said she was lost and drove her car onto the tracks in Montvale, hoping they would lead her home.

Traffic-jam news

Today's Road Warrior column is completely devoted to roadwork, based on complaining e-mails from readers (L-1). 

Staff Writer John Cichowski could have written it while stuck in traffic on the way to the office.

F.U. to Hackensack

Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, couldn't find any room for Hackensack news today.

Hackensack reporter Stephanie Akin squandered her considerable talents on a story about a man charged with firing three shots at a building (L-1 on Saturday).

More manure

On today's Better Living front, The Corner Table column by Staff Writer Elisa Ung celebrates the produce from Lani's Farm in Bordentown, one of the growers at the Tenafly Farmers' Market (BL-1).

Ung doesn't explain why she quotes Manhattan chefs who serve Steve Yoo's wonderful produce, but none in North Jersey.

And she exaggerates wildly and shows her ignorance, despite many years of food reporting, with this statement:

"Yoo's produce is not certified organic, but his methods put that label to shame ...."

The shame is on her for not knowing Certified Organic produce doesn't use artificial pesticides, either.

Scandale's colossal waste of space

Image via Wikipedia

Tough shit, football fans. The greedy Jets and Giants team owners didn't spring for a retractable roof at the new stadium in East Rutherford, but The Record continues to make excuses for them.

Editor Francis Scandale is in heat again and engaging in his peculiar male-bonding ritual with the other male editors: news meetings filled with ass-slapping, high-fiving and jock-strap waving ahead of the Super Bowl.

Today, on the front page -- and on a full inside page (A-6) -- The Record of Woodland Park allows jock-itching, fuzzy thinking Staff Writer John Brennan to make an inane comparison between the Giants' and Jets' New Meadowlands Stadium and the Arlington, Texas, venue where the game will be played Sunday. 

I fear this will be only the first of this week's front-page stories catering to a minority of sports fans. The only benefit the majority of readers gain from this colossal waste of space is to remind them none of their tax dollars were spent in the Meadowlands. They've just wasted another 50 cents on the paper.

The lead Page 1 story by Staff Writer Jeff Pillets doesn't answer the obvious question: Did Governor Christie know the Port Authority had just paid $95.5 million to lease land in Manhattan for the Hudson River rail tunnels before he canceled the project, ostensibly because of potential cost overruns? 

I'm waiting for Pillets to get to the bottom of Christie's real motivation: pleasing his wife, who complained she'd have to walk too far to connect to the subway.

Local yokels  

News from Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and other important communities is missing today in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section. 

In contrast to photos of fender-benders and non-fatal rollover accidents that she used to run as filler on L-1 and L-3, the death of a 22-year-old Paterson woman in a DWI collision early Sunday is relegated to L-6 today.

Editors are at a loss for words

Image by wallyg via Flickr

Has the departure of Tom Davis meant the end of anti-light rail stories in The Record?

Editor Francis Scandale is like a lot of journalists, including many members of his own staff. Issues bore him. He probably hardly notices the decidedly anti-mass transit slant of The Record of Woodland Park, and you'd have to pull him and other editors kicking and screaming out of their gas-guzzling SUVs.

Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes are probably totally unaware of  the dysfunctional legal immigration system, and, besides, illegal aliens sell papers big time, so don't bother them.

Couple that with the awe in which they hold Governor Christie, who gets support in news stories as well as in columns and editorials by Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin, and you have a newspaper that fails to serve readers day after day. 

Ignoring readers

Serving readers is another issue that bores them, as they struggle to put out a paper with a staff whose overall productivity has plummeted, but the problem is some of them are their "pets."

Look at today's front page. Apparently, there is so little going on in North Jersey, a big chunk of A-1 is taken up by football photos -- this despite surveys that show sports is way down on the list of topics readers want to read about.

The lead story is a preview of the sentencing of an ultra-right-wing radio host who had to threaten to kill federal judges in a blog post before anyone paid any attention to him, and he sucked in the paper and Columnist Mike Kelly, who helped cover his three trials.

Also on A-1 is a story on a bilingual class that readers normally would find on the front of the Local section or on L-2, which carried "daily" education coverage ordered by Publisher Stephen A. Borg until it petered out this year.

Burying genocide

The Local section today isn't even worth mentioning, except for how Sykes buried a new curriculum at Bergen Community College to bring to the fore "the forgotten genocide" of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in the early 1900s (L-2).

Over the years, this issue has been handled with such cowardice by the so-called journalists who run the former Hackensack daily.

And food writer Elisa Ung rubbed salt into the wounds in 2009, when she called South Paterson a "Turkish enclave" and "Little Istanbul" -- even though the Paterson neighborhood had been settled decades before by Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians, some of the very same people who were oppressed by the Ottoman Turks.

Readers' holiday wishes

In Better Living on Sunday, Ung ran a column of comments on "holiday wishes" from wealthy restaurant owners, chefs and others in the food business -- to whom she seems beholden -- rather than from the restaurant patrons who made them rich. 

Here are some of my holiday wishes, directed at some of the food professionals she quoted.

To Tracy Nieporent of Tenafly, a partner in the Myriad Restaurant Group: 

Why were there flies in the dining rooms of Tribeca Grill and Nobu in Manhattan during my lunchtime visits? As you know, flies spend most of their time in shit, and are among the filthiest of insects.

To John Piliouras, executive chef of Nisi Estiatorio in Englewood:

Why do you charge $23 to $34 per pound of whole fish, which is inexpensive for the restaurant to buy?

To Christine Nunn, chef-owner of Picnic in Fair Lawn:

For patrons watching their cholesterol and their weight, do you serve alternatives to dishes with butter and heavy cream that seem to be your specialty?

To all of the food professionals quoted:

If you're not already doing so, please tell your customers more about how the food you serve was grown or raised so they can make intelligent and healthy choices. Not everyone you serve is like Ung, who is blinded by an obsession for dessert.

 

Sex, crime and sports

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Here's an exchange with a reader in response to my previous post, Challenge to Mother Hen Deirdre?

Anonymous said...

I'm with the previous poster, the Record nailed it with the nanny story. Listen, Victor, there's three topics that sell papers: sex, crime and sports. The Record should do more of that, not less.

June 9, 2010 10:49 PM

 

 

Victor E. Sasson said...

I don't have a problem with the volume of coverage, except when it excludes legitimate news, but its placement on A-1 often is questionable. I know what sells papers, of course, but the editors are doing a disservice to readers in Hackensack and other towns by ignoring their concerns day after day. That's indefensible. The point I was trying to make with the nanny trial is that by covering it so well and putting it on the front of L-1, we convicted this woman, despite the jury verdict. The only reason I can see for the story making Page 1 is to try to rehabilitate the poor woman's image. The editors sacrificed this woman on the altar of selling papers. Even in the youth baseball series, you can see the corrosive influence of glorifying sports and the business of sports on the front page.

June 10, 2010 10:30 AM

What do you think?

The food-phobic travel editor

Page 1 of The Record today is filled with hard news, which is not always the case. The newspaper loves putting sports and infrastructure stories all over the front. Readers may not know that a story, no matter how important, will not be assigned to the central element of the page unless it has a great photo (or graphic, as in the algebra-test story today). In Record parlance, that story is "the patch."

On Page A-8, a story about a protest by commercial fishermen is silent on whether the new rules will affect New Jersey fishing ports.

A letter to the editor on A-11 claims "police salaries are out of control." The Record has published a number of stories in recent years, blaming high police and teacher salaries for the financial troubles of many towns. But it has been silent for the past decade on the incredible inefficiencies of home rule. Does Bergen County need 70 police chiefs, and police and fire departments; almost as many superintendents of schools and Departments of Public Works, and 100 to 200 neighborhood schools? Aren't they the reason property taxes are so high?

The Local section has no municipal news from diverse Teaneck, Hackensack and Englewood.

Better Living  has no food coverage, which is the case on most Saturdays, unless you count the stories on Halloween candy.

The Sunday Travel section -- delivered with the Saturday paper -- is a collector's item. It actually carries a story about restaurants (in New Orleans). Many travel sections are filled with stories about food, a big reason many people travel, but not The Record's section.

Have readers noticed the paper has had no major articles about travel in South Korea in many, many years? It's believed The Record's travel editor -- an animal lover -- is horrified by the notion  that some South Koreans allegedly eat dogs and won't run any stories about South Korea. This same editor traveled to Africa to help animals -- not people.

The story about New Orleans restaurants confines itself to the French Quarter, ignoring all the great neighborhood places, including Li'l Dizzy's Cafe (shrimp and grits) and Parkway Bakery (overstuffed po' boy sandwiches). It also provides no strategy for avoiding all the artery-clogging butter and cream in creole food, such as eating at one of the great Vietnamese places in or near the city.

Image via Wikipedia