Identifying with a sex addict

Image by United Nations Development Programme via Flickr












Do Publisher Stephen A. Borg, Editor Francis "Frank The Castrato" Scandale and other male mucky mucks at The Record of Woodland Park identify with sex-addicted golfer Tiger Woods? Why, then, do they give his divorce and a Paramus tournament half of the front page today?


Front and center is sports columnist Tara Sullivan's gentle handling of Woods, starting with a lame lead paragraph. Nowhere in her story does the phrase "sex addict" appear, and none of the reporters who questioned him asked whether he is still screwing around or going for therapy or what.


It's not as if Borg and the editors are unfamiliar with addictions. Former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg is a reformed alcoholic who was ordered by his doctor to stop smoking. The elder Borg's behavior when he was drinking was common knowledge in the newsroom, and the paper even ran a story about his DWI arrest.


I recall being invited to lunch in the corporate dining room with the elder Borg and Stephen Berger, who at the time was the new executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (1985-90), an agency I covered as a reporter for The Record. Mac used the F-word to ask Berger, whom he was meeting for the first time, when an aviation museum would open at Teterboro Airport.


The main headline worries if Woods will be able to rebuild his game and life. What about the lives of his ex-wife and the children whom he betrayed? Aren't the editors worried about them, too? Even if you are a rabid sports fan who loves golf, Woods' behavior is reprehensible. His story deserves to be banished to the back pages.

Blaming Obama


Now, Governor Chritie has jumped on the bandwagon of blaming the Obama administration for everything. He says unyielding federal bureaucrats, who denied New Jersey an education grant of up to $400 million, are "the kind of stuff, candidly, that drives people crazy about government...."


Emphatically no. What drives people crazy about government is that a conservative Republican like Christie comes along promising to cut property taxes, then turns around and eases the tax burden on the Borgs and other millionaires. How does he make up for it? He refuses to raise the low gasoline tax, which boosts mass transit, and cuts aid to the middle and working classes, including seniors, women and poor schoolchildren. What a fraud.


Flooding where?

In Local, it took the former Hackensack daily a couple of weeks to report what Pakistanis in North Jersey are doing to to help victims  of flooding (photo).


A day after the death of a Fair Lawn woman in a plane crash  in Nepal was all over Page 1, another Fair Lawn woman, killed by an NJ Transit train on Wednesday, is banished today to L-3, where the photo caption doesn't even give her name. I guess her life isn't worth anything to head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, because she didn't die on her birthday or wasn't headed to Mount Everest.


No Hackensack news


 Local contains no news about the core Bergen County  towns of Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood.


Reviewer returns



The Second Helpings blog on northjersey.com resumed Aug. 23, with an entry by Elisa Ung, the restaurant reviewer who has been on leave. It's ironic that the highly promotional blog carries the same name of a food-rescue group founded in Indianapolis in 1998 that today serves 50,000 meals to the hungry every month.


With Ung's return and the appoinment of a new food editor, readers can only hope food coverage improves. Since Bill Pitcher left as food editor Aug. 6, what had been poor coverage became pathetically poor.