An emphatic two thumbs down for Roger Ebert

More than 10 NJ Transit bus routes were disrupted by the closing of the Anderson Street Bridge between Hackensack and Teaneck due to emergency weight-limit restrictions, above. Since the September closure, The Record hasn't interviewed a single bus rider on how their commute has been affected, but has carried the Road Warrior's endless hand-wringing over every tiny inconvenience faced by North Jersey lead-footed drivers.

With greedy publishing families like the Borgs and scandals involving fabricated quotes and even entire stories at such prestigious publications as The New York Times and Washington Post, you'd think Hollywood would have exposed the dark side of newspapers long ago.

You'd be wrong, of course, and critic Roger Ebert spent more than 45 years analyzing films without ever mentioning how directors have done exactly the opposite -- they go out of their way to glorify the press.

Hollywood might shy away from blasting the press because critics like Ebert, who worked for a big newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, could make or break them.

And you know the only reason Editor Marty Gottlieb put Ebert's obituary on the front page of Friday's paper is because he was a fellow newspaperman.

The Record's Friday entertainment tabloid once carried Ebert's reviews, but they ended several years ago, in an apparent cost-cutting move.

He's no Jeff Page

Gottlieb also seems to be indulging another fellow newspaperman, Staff Writer John Cichowski, whose Road Warrior columns are paved with inaccuracies.

On Friday, the Road Warrior's annual pothole column appeared on the Local front -- symbolizing the deep whole he continues to dig for the paper's credibility.

Local yokels

Five pages of Friday's Local was devoted to higher-education news, but head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes still needed a photo of a non-fatal accident to fill the local-news section (L-7).

Her deputy, Dan Sforza, spent the day out of the office, measuring potholes for Cichowski.

Rutgers brouhaha

Today, for the third day in a row, Gottlieb presents more screaming Page 1 headlines and blanket coverage of Rutgers University and its abusive basketball coach, Mike Rice.

Meanwhile, readers have had to listen to WBGO-FM radio news or search for stories on Trenton budget hearings to find out how Governor Christie intends to screw the middle and working classes again by short-changing mass transit and affordable housing. 

Crossing readers

Today's story on a Fort Lee crosswalk ticket blitz took readers by surprise -- coming after a March 22 Road Warrior column that warned about the use of plainclothes officers in a similar Teaneck crackdown this month (L-1).

But so far, drivers haven't seen any such blitz on Cedar Lane.

Sykes and Sforza couldn't find room for Hackensack news today, but did find space for the Dean's List; photos of a minor SUV and car fire, and a motorboat being pulled from a river; and for a story on road repairs in Edgewater (L-2, L-3 and L-6).

New to My Blog List 

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Hackensack Scoop
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Reviewer is obsessed with dessert

Image via Wikipedia

The front page of  The Record today actually contains news -- a story that required some digging on 34 state employees who are collecting gobs of overtime and a rare local story on Page 1 about four Bergen County towns in the same high school district.

The Local section has a story from Englewood on teacher contract talks, the fifth or sixth story from that city this month, depending on whether you include mention of sidewalk repairs on Oct. 15. The paper is continuing its seeming boycott of news from Hackensack, the county seat that was the paper's home for more than 110 years. The last mention: street repairs at mid-month.

In Better Living's centerfold, an Italian restaurant in Fair Lawn gets two and a half stars from reviewer Elisa Ung. That's only a half star more than she awarded a faux-Caribbean chain restaurant in Wayne several weeks ago.

In the review of Davia, Ung reports on a potato-crusted salmon entree and a strip steak, failing to mention whether the former was wild or artificially-colored farmed fish or whether the latter was grass-fed or at least raised without anitbiotics and growth hormones.

Ung spends too much time writing about desserts. Recently, she related she had a "nightmare" about dessert. I guess she doesn't realize that many people are watching their weight or cholesterol and forgo dessert, especially at a restaurant with big portions, like the one she is reviewing today. In fact, she says fewer than half of its customers order dessert, but that doesn't stop her from sampling four of them.

I found the following hilarious. She reports the restaurant is named after the owner's daughter. "Their son, John, wanted no part of the name." That's a good thing, isn't it, but with a name like John, why does that have to be mentioned? Would anyone name an Italian restaurant just John? Wouldn't  people think it's an elaborate bathroom? Maybe John's Trattoria.

On Page 20  of Better Living, the restaurant health inspections appear, but many towns' restaurants are excluded today and, in fact, never appear in the paper. Thirteen towns are listed today out of the more than 90 in The Record's circulation area.

(This post was revised on Saturday, 10/31/09.)