Editors see politics in every Christie belch, burp and fart

Plunging gasoline prices continue to have an adverse impact on the environment: Sales of hybrid cars fall, owners postpone trading in their gas guzzlers for more efficient vehicles and many people drive more, aggravating air pollution. This Delta station is in Teaneck.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

For the third time this week, The Record's front page features Editor Marty Gottlieb's Three Bimbos, including yet another Charles Stile column on how Governor Christie's actions play in Iowa.

The third bimbo, inmate Teresa "Real Housewife" Giudice, appears in a Page 1 brief.

Stile isn't even doing any original reporting, but merely regurgitating "Republican operatives and donors in ... Christie's corner," as his first sentence notes (A-1).

Missing from nearly every Stile column in the past five years is how Christie's actions play in New Jersey, where he has tried to kill the middle class and repeatedly vetoed a tax surcharge on millionaires.

GWB scandal

Today's off-lead is Staff Writer Shawn Boburg's retrospective on the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal -- one year after the media uncovered an explosive e-mail from Christie's chief of staff:

"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

But even this story tries to put Christie's likely involvement in political retribution against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee in the best light.

Boburg's second paragraph notes the e-mail "unleashed a massive political scandal ... and caused changes big and small" (A-1).

Though the reporter mentions "action by the legislatures in both New Jersey and New York," he is silent on the veto of those reform packages by Christie and his New York counterpart.

So, it's unclear what Port Authority "reforms" are being cited in the Page 1 headline.

And The Record and other media haven't acknowledged their failure to uncover the roles of Christie aides and cronies in the scandal in the two months before his November 2013 re-election. 

Paris massacre

Gottlieb, former global editions editor of The New York Times, gave up business trips to Paris for a trans-Hudson commute.

But in today's Page 1 coverage of the attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris, no one asks whether police could have prevented the killing of 12 people on Wednesday.

That was the same way Gottlieb handled the invasion of Westfield Garden State Plaza by a disturbed young man with a rifle on Nov. 4, 2013.

The show of force by Paramus police was too late to prevent panic among shoppers and employees, as well as the man's suicide.

Mercedes-Benz

Two more stories on the move of Mercedes-Benz USA to Atlanta appear in the paper today (A-1 and B-1).

Staff Writer Hugh R. Morley tries to compare the quality of life in Charlotte and Atlanta -- including restaurants, museums and art center -- to North Jersey, where residents and visitors have the world's greatest city, New York, just across the river.

The stories also put into context the loss of up to 1,000 jobs by 2017, when Mercedes is expected to move into a new U.S. headquarters in Atlanta.

Mercedes' employees are a small fraction of the more than 22,000 workers who commute to corporate headquarters in Montvale, Park Ridge and Woodcliff Lake every day (B-2).