Credibility gap widens

Image via Wikipedia
Images of Asbury Park.

Do the desperate editors expect long-time readers to believe anything in Staff Writer Michael Kelly's report on Atlantic City? In nearly three pages of The Record of Woodland Park today, starting on Page 1, Kelly comes close to writing an obituary of New Jersey's premiere resort.


How weird, because 10 years ago, almost to the day (Aug. 6, 2000), The Sunday Record also published a three-page Kelly story, and it sounded just like an obituary for Asbury Park, another struggling shore resort, with appropriately grim photos by the great Carmine Galasso.


Unfortunately, this story contained a glaring omission that raised questions about the reporter's credibility -- questions that have never been answered.


Times trumps Kelly


On the same exact day Kelly's Asbury Park story appeared, an upbeat cover story in The New York Times' New Jersey section reported that urban homosexual men and women were leading the way in reviving the run-down resort, drawn by affordable, stylish homes and gay clubs. One photo showed two women on the beach with their arms around each other.


The two stories were like night and day, with Kelly reporting conditions that had existed for a decade or more, and The Times breaking the story of the resort's turnaround.


The headline on The Times piece:

MOVE OVER, FIRE ISLAND, HERE COMES ASBURY PARK

The headlines on Kelly's story:

In love with a faded queen

Asbury Park's

survivors cling

to future hope

Forget the awful drop headline ("future hope"). 


In Kelly's story, there was absolutely no mention of homosexuals buying up homes and going clubbing in Asbury Park. Did the reporter's deep-seated conservatism lead him to ignore signs of revival and violate his journalistic pledge of objectivity? Did he allow his personal views of homosexuality to obscure the real story?

Kelly's language in both the Asbury Park and Atlantic City stories echo: Asbury Park is "a once-grand queen of the New Jersey shore now reduced to blighted remnants of old glory days." Of Atlantic City, he says, "This aging queen of seaside gambling and salt water taffy is gasping for life. It may already be too late."

It's too late, all right, too late for readers to salvage anything from Kelly's reporting, which was repudiated a decade ago. How The Record's editors missed the huge contradiction in his and The Times' Asbury Park stories is a puzzle, but if they did notice it, how he kept his job is the real mystery.

And it's not as if Kelly has made a great columnist, as his piece on the Opinion front today amply demonstrates. (That leering photo with his column is so unflattering, but Kelly doesn't see it.)

After pushing around hundreds of words on the release of the Pan Am Flight 103 bomber, Libya and BP, all he can mange at the end is a feeble, "Why was he set free?"  Don't readers deserve better? Don't they deserve his frank, ballsy opinions, based on his reporting and  journalistic hunches, not one rhetorical question after another?


More turkeys

What other turkeys have stories in today's paper? Well, also on Page 1, Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson tries to scare North Jersey residents into believing their taxes are going to soar when tax breaks for the rich expire. Does anyone understand his mumbo-jumbo? Is the story credible?

Isn't this the same reporter who, covering a rally of 10,000 protesters, missed a huge sign comparing President Obama's health-care reforms to the Holocaust, complete with piles of emaciated Jewish bodies? His Nov. 5, 2009, story on A-1 made no mention of the sign.

Why is Road Warrior Columnist wasting readers time by rehashing the brouhaha over Puerto Rican birth certificates at New York City's motor vehicle agencies (L-1)? What's happening to commuters in North Jersey, John? Get out of the office once in a while, will you? Try riding the bus. There are many columns waiting to be written about them. 


Take clueless Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale, head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes and minion Dan Sforza with you.


For Hackensack news, Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado gives readers her umpteenth story on the Police Department, which is seeking state and national accreditation. One benefit would be reduced litigation, but if that comes to pass, the reporter would be out of job, because that's almost all she has written about in the past 11 months.


This is the third story Alvarado has written about the police in four days.