Does The Record care about Haiti?

Image by dougtone via Flickr

On a day when The Record of Woodland Park could finally deliver an honest front-page assessment of Governor Corzine and prepare readers for the financial misery ahead for New Jersey, do the editors actually expect us to believe they care about Haiti? The Record doesn't even care about blacks who live in Bergen County, and the editors have a miserable record of hiring and retaining minorities.

But here on Page 1 is a hand-wringing story about the fate of thousands in the poorest nation in the hemisphere, displacing most of the coverage of Corzine's final State of the State message and showing the paper's long-held bias against the governor. The Corzine story, shoved down to the bottom of the page, isn't even a dispassionate news story, but rather a political column.

This allows the lazy, incompetent, desperate editors to splash all over the front page a huge, "banger" headline and a dramatic photo -- two elements required for a front-page story, no matter how relevant to North Jersey readers. 

The Record doesn't cover the Caribbean or even the Caribbean communities in North Jersey. When was the last time you read a story about the large, hard-working, church-going Jamaican community in Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and Paterson outside of an occasional crime story? Stories about Cuba, if you  see them, are not assigned to an "objective" reporter; they are covered by a Cuban exile staffer who hates Castro (the paper had two at one time). There are so few Spanish-speaking newsroom staffers, so-called Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado had to be pulled off her beat last week to cover a murder in the city.

The bias against Corzine is even clearer in the editorial on Page A-10. "For the majority of New Jerseyans, his record is clear," the paper thunders. "Property taxes are too high, public schools aren't uniformly good, the state is drowning in debt and too many public officials -- many from the governor's political party -- have gone to jail."

Of course, what goes unsaid is that property taxes are too high because of the home-rule system The Record vigorously defends (for example, does the 14-man Northvale Police Department really need a chief who is paid $130,000?; see Page L-3). That Corzine has done more for children and public schools than any of his predecessors. That the state is drowning in debt, because of the recession and the fiscal slight-of-hand of governors who preceded him, including one of the paper's favorites, Christie Whitman. That with so many petty, home-rule officials putting their hands out, corruption in both parties is guaranteed.


In the Local section, the drought of municipal, development and education news from Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and many other towns continues.


Does The Record really need all those overpaid editors to turn out a paper like this? The news editors, those minions who spend their evenings drawing squares and headline specs on page layouts, could do just as well. Why doesn't the Borg family give walking papers to Frank Scandale, Frank Burgos, Deirdre Sykes, Alfred Doblin and all the other scoundrels they employ, instead of cutting back retiree medical benefits?

It's because Stephen and Jennifer Borg, the spoiled siblings who are now running the paper, don't care about the quality of The Record, and former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg is so out of it, he no longer is a factor.

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Stephen Borg, who took over from his father in mid-2006, is more concerned about the size of the house he lives in, and keeping his children out of Englewood's segregated elementary and middle schools, than about local news coverage.You'd think Borg, a marketing wizard who ordered the editors to print food and education coverage "every day," would also have asked them to duplicate USA Today's daily listing of news from every state by running a bit of news from every one of the 90 or so towns in The Record's circulation area. Even a meeting notice might convince readers the paper gives a shit about them and what's happening in their towns.