Way too little, way too late

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Three reporters for The Record spent the better part of three years "investigating" a law enforcement official -- under the supervision of one of the top editors in the newsroom -- and the lame results were put on line Tuesday night and printed today on the front of the Local section. Only a few promotional paragraphs appeared on the front page and that speaks volumes about the failure of the project.


After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries and crippling news coverage of  Hackensack and other towns, it appears the newspaper had to resort to guilt by association to publish anything at all.

And despite all that time and effort, the lazy, incompetent editor and the trio of hapless reporters were unable to report how much Michael Mordaga earned from his alleged conflict of interest involving Hackensack University Medical Center.

The former Hackensack daily also doesn't explain why, if the Mordaga-hopsital relationship ended in February 2007, as it reports, it took all this time to print the story.

What does this say about the abilities of the lead reporter on the investigation -- Jean Rimbach -- and the two municipal reporters pulled off their beats for months at a time to assist her -- Shawn Boburg and Monsy Alvarado, who ignored covering  Hackensack  -- or the judgment of their editor, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes?

The investigation marks another low for The Record, which is careful to avoid mentioning its own conflict involving the Hackensack medical center.  

Jennifer A. Borg, the daughter of the paper's multimillionaire owner, sat on the hospital board at the same time as the paper made hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling advertising to HUMC. (In fact, the online version of the Mordaga story appeared on northjersey.com under the hospital's banner advertisement. That ad was taken down later today.) You'd think Borg, a lawyer who is vice president and general counsel of North Jersey Media Group, would be more familiar with the nuances of ethical conflicts than Mordaga, who was chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.

You have to read the continuation of the story today on Page L-6 to find out Mordaga "has not been accused of any impropriety."  Plus, there is absolutely no suggestion that his private consultancy at the hospital affected in any way the prosecutor's criminal investigations.

In fact, the paper is so desperate to nail  Mordaga, the reporters have to dredge up the case against former state Sen. Joseph Coniglio, who is serving a prison sentence for accepting $100,000 in consulting fees for steering state grants to the hospital. The hospital apparently is the only connection between the two men.


http://www.northjersey.com/