Christie butts heads with state's high court

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Governor Christie to teachers and everyone else: Do what I say or else.

A governor full of hubris, saying he might defy a ruling of the state's highest court, would be front-page news anywhere but at The Record of Woodland Park, where Editor Francis Scandale is famous for news misjudgment going way back to 9/11.

So, readers have to turn to Page A-3 for a Star-Ledger story reporting Governor-cum-Dictator Christie will close hospitals and lay off cops and firefighters, if the Supreme Court orders him to restore more than $1 billion in education funds -- if he even obeys the ruling.

Christie -- at heart, an argumentative lawyer who has The Record and other media in his pocket -- is really pissed that Associate Justice Barry Albin twice mentioned how Christie cut school aid to low-income children, but refused to impose a millionaires tax to raise $1 billion in new revenue.

To Scandale, this brewing constitutional crisis appears to be less far less significant than more of Christie's do-what-I say-or-else tough talk to teachers, a story that leads A-1 today.

News revolution?

When I first looked at Page 1, I thought the news clerks and reporters had seized control of the newsroom and run a story on the rise of the Tea Party and the Republicans' drive to preserve wealth:

How greed movement

shaped North Jersey

Wait a second. That story is about a different kind of "green." I misread the headline. Never mind. The Record's editors still are marching to the drums of the spoiled Borg siblings.

Searching for municipal news in Local, readers find lots of Law & Order news -- courtesy of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her minions.

Sykes needed two gee-whiz but non-fatal accident photos to fill space on L-2 and L-8.

Poor geography lesson

A huge Better Living cover photo of chicken -- presumably pumped up with antibiotics -- whets readers' appetites for Elisa Ung's review of Mekong Grill, a new Vietnamese restaurant in Ridgewood.

Ung reports that for years before Mekong Grill opened, "Bergen-based food lovers" drove to Spring Valley, N.Y., "to get their Vietnamese fix."

But nothing could be farther from the truth: Chef K.T. Tran has been dishing out great Vietnamese food at a take-out stand or restaurants in Cresskill, Fort Lee, Englewood and Tenafly for well over 15 years.

In fact, in a review just three months ago, Ung praised Tran's "precise cooking and fresh Vietnamese flavors" at her newest restaurant, Simply Vietnamese. 

Rehabilitation of Paterson

Image by Afghan LORDّ via Flickr

Do you recall how The Record once devoted hundreds of hours of staff time and tens of thousands of dollars in salaries to portray Paterson as North Jersey's biggest drug bazaar, which lured many Bergen County suburbanites to ruin? Then, more recently, the paper ran another sensational series on prostitution in Silk City.

Well, that's all in the past (but you'll notice how reporters Mike Kelly and John Brennan have been prostituting themselves with their "public relations" coverage of a cop-turned-criminal and a tipsy athlete-turned-killer, respectively).

For the second day in a row, Paterson has been put in a flattering light on Page 1, the latest in a series of positive stories since North Jersey Media Group and its flagship daily moved their headquarters last year to Woodland Park (formerly West Paterson).

I haven't been counting column inches or stories, but it may be fair to say Paterson has received more news coverage than Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years before the greedy Borg family hatched a plan to sell its landmark River Street building.

Someone should tell Brennan and the news copy editor who read his story that killer Jayson Williams won't "accept" an 18- month prison sentence today, as if it is an invitation to a tea party. The reporter again omits in his Page A-6 story that Williams killed his limo driver after a night of drinking, but found room to tell readers the square footage of the ex-athlete's home (27,000 square feet -- eat your heart out, Stephen A. Borg, you have live in a mere 8,500 square feet).

On A-8 today, the editorial on recycling incentives in Paterson includes the financial arrangements with a private company the reporter omitted from her front-page story yesterday.

On the front of Local for a change, an obituary about an interesting North Jerseyan appears in place of the drivel from Kelly and fellow Columnist John Cichowski.

I'm glad Vietnamese Chef K.T. Tran is getting more recognition for the traditional soup called pho she has been serving at Saigon R. in Englewood for close to a decade, but why does Better Living waste space on a recipe that calls for 10 pounds of beef bones among its 20 or so ingredients? Do the lazy editors think any reader is going to tackle this at home?