GOP radicals deserve swift kick, not banner headlines

Our tax dollars at work. Hackensack Fire Department equipment producing these geysers were parked between Costco Wholesale and Pep Boys on Monday, near the Hackensack River, above and below.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

The Record and other media love conflict, as today's lead Page 1 story on Tea Party crackpots demonstrates.

Why don't newspaper, radio and TV reporters challenge Republican claims that the Affordable Care Act is a "train wreck" and a "job killer," instead of merely quoting such nonesense?

And contradicting such prominent play is an editorial condemning Friday's vote in the GOP-led House of Representatives:

Withhold funding for health-care reform while keeping the federal government up and running, temporarily, is called "one of the most irresponsible votes in recent memory" (A-13).

Where is the reporting that Governor Christie's refusal to set up the law's health-care exchanges will lead to less competition among insurance providers and reduce the savings of New Jerseyans who buy coverage starting on Oct. 1?

Sandy and Chris

Isn't it strange that state Sen. Barbara Buono -- not the media -- managed to find Sandy victims who haven't gotten a penny of federal aid nearly a year after the superstorm (A-3)?

Editor Marty Gottlieb should have put the Buono campaign story and a story on the $25 million state-revenue shortfall (A-4) outside -- replacing Tea Party antics and another crappy sports column.

OK. That wouldn't square with Gottlieb's effort to put Christie's bid for a second term in the best light, even if that means bending the facts.

Miguel Perez

A story on L-3 today rehabilitates the image of former Record reporter Miguel Perez, a Cuban exile who was stripped of his column when then-editor Francis "Frank" Scandale decided the newsroom was too diverse.

Scandale also ended the columns of Lawrence Aaron, who is black, and Elaine D'Aurizio, the only female news columnist at the time.

Spanish conflict 

Today's story also inadvertently reveals how little diversity exists in Woodland Park when reporter Monsy Alvarado blurts out:

"I am one of two reporters who speak Spanish at The Record. There is a need for more people like me, who speak Spanish...."

Perez also was one of the few Spanish-speaking staffers, leading Scandale to create a real conflict of interest by assigning the rabidly anti-Castro reporter to cover Cuba and the large exile community in North Jersey.

About Hackensack 

In Hackensack news today, Police Director Michael Mordaga is barring officers from being paid to do residency fraud investigations for the school district (L-1).

Also, see Regina DiPasqua's letter to the editor on the Hackensack school district's refusal to pay the city about $1 million for a school resource officer (A-13).

On Friday, another letter to the editor, from Howard Vogel of Fair Lawn, urges voters "to fire" Christie in November "and let him campaign for president on his own time and with his own money" (Friday's A-18). Amen.

Friday's Local section continues the blow-by-blow coverage of two multimillionaires' legal battle over the Hudson News empire (Friday's Local front).

Get me rewrite

John Cichowski's Road Warrior column on Friday rehashed an earlier column, according to an e-mail from a concerned reader:

"In his Friday column, the Road Warrior takes the exact same information from his Wednesday column and shuffles it around to report the exact same information about less transportation funding for urban counties v. rural counties in New Jersey.

"Either The Record management and Road Warrior are totally clueless about what they previously reported or they think and do not care that their readers might actually remember what they read in the Road Warrior columns.

"What is even stranger is that all of the surprising news in his two columns took place seven months ago.

"The Road Warrior actually did report some new information. He was stunned that 70 per cent of New Jerseyans live in only 50 per cent of its counties, as if that is newsworthy."

Read the full e-mail on the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

Road Warrior should get out more

Drive, she said

See Friday's Better Living tab for a lukewarm, 2-star  review of 15 Grand American Bistro in far-off Montvale (BL-18).

It appears as if Vincent Giambona, co-owner of a popular Fort Lee restaurant, opened this "updated, upscale diner" to shorten his commute from his home in River Vale.

Related articles

• More Christie P.R., LTACH and the Zisa curse
• Editors keep on treating photographers like shit
• A woman will give Chris Christie a big spanking

How Jimmy Margulies got the bad news

In the mid-1950s, The Bergen Evening Record sponsored pistol matches, according to the plaque on a trophy displayed on the 5th Floor of the Bergen County Administration Building in Hackensack.

In an interview with The Daily Cartoonist, Jimmy Margulies, The Record's former cartoonist, disclosed how he found out he was being laid off:

"I was given no advance notice that I was going to lose my job," Margulies said in the interview with the Web site for professional cartoonists that was posted on Feb. 26.

"When I arrived at work on Thursday, the editorial page editor, my supervisor, told me we had to go to Human Resources to meet with the editor-in-chief. So I realized that this was going to be the way they tell you your job is eliminated, even before they actually said the words. I was laid off."

To read the full interview, click on the following link:

The day I found out I was fired


Margulies' boss


The editorial page editor is Alfred P. Doblin.


The layoff of Margulies recalls the firing of Lawrence Aaron, who was The Record's only black columnist.

Doblin bought a cake and threw Aaron a going-away party, as if the columnist had gotten a better job and decided to leave on his own.


A third buyout

An Anonymous comment reports that Staff Writer John Gavin, one of the few black reporters left in the newsroom, also took the buyout offered to staffers over 60 years of age.

Reporters who won't go quietly

A 1996 Ford Explorer SUV like the one involved in a horrific accident on Route 80 (photo from Wikipedia).

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

They are the editors and reporters who seem like they have been around forever, and whose contributions to the newspaper -- in quantity or quality -- are in inverse proportion to their long years of service. 

Some of them are so obscure, they escaped Publisher Stephen A. Borg's rampage through The Record newsroom after he took over in mid-2006.

Borg folded every features section except Travel, giving klutzy Jill Schensul tenure in the editor's job. 

Not far away, fair-weather columnist Ray Edel survived the culling, as did Charles Saydah, editor of letters to the editor, who hid out in a back office except when taking his midday jog, leaving his pages filled with typos and inaccurate headings.


But others are far more visible, and command much higher salaries. 

Today, the centerpiece on Page 1 of the Woodland Park paper is by Staff Writer Jean Rimbach, who racks up what is believed to be only her second byline of the year with yet another story about quirky Teterboro. Are we to believe this piece took her months to report and write?

On the Local front, Columnist Mike Kelly has another laughable column. When I was still a news copy editor, his stuff was so bad, copy editors had to be ordered to edit it and write a headline.

John Cichowski, the Road Warrior columnist, has a workload few columnists can manage. He has to turn out three commuting columns a week, and his nonsense tells you he long ago ran out of ideas and should be getting out of the office more often to ride and rate mass transit, which he seems to abhor.

Editor Frank Scandale

Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale got rid of several hard-working, productive veterans, including Columnists Miguel Perez and Lawrence Aaron, the only Hispanic and black columnists, respectively; and Elaine D'Aurizio, at the time the only woman writing a column outside Sports. 

Young Borg moved against others for no apparent reason, most notably Assistant Managing Editor/Photography Rich Gigli and Joanne Hoerr, supervisor of news clerks.


But Rimbach, Kelly and Cichowski are three do-nothing reporters who won't go quietly or otherwise, likely because they are protected by editors, including head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes. Are Sykes and Rimbach friends, and is that why the editor is pampering the least productive reporter on a staff of about 50?

Is anybody assessing the quality of Kelly's and Cichowski's columns? Today, Kelly pushes around hundreds of words about bears, but does he add anything to the debate over an issue that affects a minority of the paper's readership? 

For years, he has merely rehashed old news, too timid to go out on a limb with his own opinions, hence all the rhetorical questions he asks in his columns. 

Cichowski's Sunday column was about keep right/pass left laws -- just another obscure debate among drivers that he grabs onto in desperation. At least we should be grateful he isn't doing another column on potholes or license-plate tags for teenage drivers. 

Teterboro on A-1


Rimbach's splashy A-1 story today portrays Teterboro as a bastion of nepotism and a tax haven for industry, but didn't we know that already from several stories that ran recently in reaction to a legislative proposal to break up the borough?  She doesn't even assess if town officials are in their  right minds for insisting on living near the incredibly noisy airport.


A far more engaging front-page piece today would have been Sachi Fujimori's well-written story on Closter farms, free vegetables for residents and an honor system for buying brown eggs (Better Living front). Charming.

Five days after the paper hailed Sheriff Jerry Speziale in Passaic County as a jet-set celebrity, a story at the bottom of A-1 today reveals a darker side to the free-spending lawman: 

Lawsuits alleging cronyism, neglect and worse at the county jail. Another mixed message from a staff that struggles to handle breaking news.

In Local, there is no Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood news, or anything from many other towns. 

On the front, a horrific Route 80 accident (story and photo) occurred near the exit for the Garret Mountain Plaza building where the paper has its newsroom. 

More savvy editors would have said whether the 1996 Ford Explorer involved in Sunday's fatality was one of those recalled for its allegedly defective Firestone tires.


Inside, Monsy Alvarado's follow-up to Saturday's head-on collision in Englewood fails to mention that the Bergen County cop's car crossed the double-yellow line, an important detail also missing from the original coverage by three reporters.

Missing from The Record

The Record's old headquarters in Hackensack.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Have you noticed that movie reviews in the Friday Better Living entertainment tabloid are now being supplied by the Star-Ledger, replacing Roger Ebert?

Is this temporary or permanent, and was money a factor? Don't expect an explanation from the editors at The Record of Woodland Park.


For example, there has been nothing on why the lazy, incompetent editors dropped feature columns written by two of the most experienced women on the news staff, Virginia Rohan and Colleen Diskin. 

I don't remember the last time I saw Rohan's Boomers on Board or Diskin's Mother Load. 

I clicked on their names under columnists at northjersey.com and came up with blank spaces.


Readers were never told why Editor Frank Scandale cut news columns by three experienced staffers: 

Miguel Perez, his only Hispanic columnist; Elaine D'Aurizio, who wrote about heroic police officers, firefighters and other first responders; and Lawrence Aaron, his only black columnist, whose job was eliminated.


So readers must make do with Columnists Michael Kelly and John Cichowski, who have been off their game for years.