A deafening silence

No reader of "Eye on The Record" responded to my invitation yesterday to praise "good journalism" in that day's newspaper, in contrast to my continued harping on The Record of Woodland Park's many flaws. I guess staffers and former staffers were too busy doing their last minute Christmas shopping or searching for just the right ingredient for dinner today.

Well, for a change, I liked the lead story on the front today, about the difficulty Jersey National Guardsmen are having readjusting to civilian life after nine months in Iraq, and I was even happier to see it was written by reporter William Lamb, not Michael Kelly, who was sent to the war zone to write about the Teaneck-based unit, while actual coverage of Teaneck itself was spotty at best.

But do we need yet another Page 1 story about the roadblocks facing passage of health-care reform? Is there any sane person who doesn't want to see it passed, especially in view of how the media gave so much coverage to desperate opponents who invoked the Holocaust? Is this real conflict or more media-manufactured conflict to sell papers?

Today also brings still more coverage of the Monmouth County dad who brought his 9-year-old son son back from Brazil, while there is no story or editorial about the Bergen County custody battle that saw a Spanish woman sentenced to 14 years in jail this week. That's likely because the Monmouth case is being covered by The Star-Ledger, which shares stories with The Record as a cost-saving measure -- even though many of them don't have a North Jersey focus. It's just another way the former Hackensack daily cheats readers.

I got such a hoot out of  the Page A-21 column by Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin, who apparently is one of the few staffers who takes mass transit. He says rail commuters are "treated like leftover food." (He's such a clunky writer and apparently gets no editing. That's a ridiculous comparison. I love my homemade leftovers.) But he's on the mark when he says "bus commuters are treated like garbage," something I used to say when I urged reporters like Karen Rouse to ride the local buses and report on the quality of service.

Why is this so funny? It's because his own colleagues -- two lazy transportation reporters, a lazy transportation columnist and a lazy, incompetent assignment editor who once covered transportation -- have for years ignored rail and bus riders. Am I the only one who remembers how Assignment Editor Dan Sforza, when he was a reporter, wrote major pieces about "highways of the future," while refusing to look into new but defective NJ Transit cruiser buses with screeching rear brakes and roaring engines that drove people who lived along the routes crazy?

Look at the pedestrian coverage now of transportation reporters Tom Davis and Rouse, who also ignore rail and bus riders, or at Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski, best friend to drivers. All are enemies of mass transit -- as the recent anti-light rail story crafted by Davis and Sforza clearly shows.

The Local section today has a story about another lawsuit filed by Hackensack police officers against the chief -- an ongoing saga in the paper. Does anyone wonder why The Record, which was founded in Hackensack in 1895 and prospered here for more than 110 years, has never in memory done a series of stories on how the Zisa family apparently controls the city, which some refer to as "Zisaville"?

The Better Living tabloid was missing from my paper today, but the "automated system" could not handle my request for a replacement. I get such great home-delivery service.

My invitation to "Eye on The Record" readers stands: If you see something good in the paper, please click on "comments" at the end of this post and let the world know.