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| Residents of Tenafly have asserted their constitutional right to commute individually in gas-guzzling luxury vehicles, rejecting an NJ Transit proposal to extend pollution-free light-rail service to their wealthy community. Plans now are for light-rail service only as far as downtown Englewood and Englewood Hospital and Medical Center. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
Today and every Sunday it seems, The Record runs a column assessing how Governor Christie is doing in his bid for the White House.
In the past couple of years, Columnist Charles Stile appears to have done little else than report on how state and national politics will affect Christie's bid for the GOP nomination in 2016 (A-1).
Tabloid news
Today, Editor Marty Gottlieb went tabloid on Page 1, with a lurid story on a Closter couple's murder-suicide while their 15-month-old son remained unharmed.
The headline was trite:
Couple's violent end
shocks community
Really, how many stories like this does the staff have to do before realizing neighbors usually know very little about the lives of the people next door?
And when will The Record stop labeling photos of police on the front steps of a dead couple's home as showing officers "searching for clues" (A-6).
Christie, Wilson
But Stile's column also is at the top of the front page, next to this sensational report.
Far more interesting is Staff Writer Jim Beckerman's shocking story on the 100th anniversary of "Birth of a Nation," a racist film that apparently was endorsed by the last New Jersey governor to become president, Woodrow Wilson (A-1).
Wilson screened "The Birth of a Nation" in the White House, the first film to be shown there (A-10).
Focus on TV news
The fourth main element on Page 1 is a story about Brian Williams taking a break from anchoring the "NBC Nightly News" after false on-air statements that he was in a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while in Iraq in 2003.
Newspapers have far more serious issues to deal with -- from the faked Washington Post story on an 8-year-old heroin addict that won a Pulitzer Prize to fabricated New York Times quotes in stories by Jayson Blair to the drastic decline in local-news coverage at The Record.
More fabrication
What Staff Writer John Cichowski did recently in The Record's Road Warrior column isn't any different.
Despite a photo showing nothing of the kind, Cichowski deliberately tried to panic readers into believing a Route 4 bridge in Teaneck was unsafe, because, he claimed, it had a "gash" in a major supporting pillar.
Since then, that bridge and other Route 4 bridges shown in a subsequent column have remained open while state officials closed other spans for emergency repairs.
The Record hasn't run a correction of Cichowski's false statement, but today uses a photo of another Route 4 bridge that "got one of the lowest scores for deck evaluation" (O-2).
Does that mean the bridge is unsafe? If so, why hasn't that bridge been closed for repairs?
If it's not unsafe, why run the photo with an editorial labeled, "Closing bridges"?
On A-2 today, a correction notes a Route 17 overpass was incorrectly identified in a Friday story on bridge repairs as a Route 46 overpass.
Worse was a correction on Saturday's A-2, admitting the inept news desk ran the wrong photo for U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, who grew up in River Edge.
Turkeys galore
On the Better Living cover, Elisa Ung's The Corner Table column doesn't contain a word on whether the ground turkey in the restaurant dishes she loved was raised naturally without harmful antibiotics (BL-1).
And how did jazz musician and Teaneck resident Rufus Reid overlook the Golden Grill Restaurant as a great place to hang out in the township (BL-1)?
On the Business cover, Richard Newman's story on Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing services doesn't mention the low pay and exploitation of the drivers (B-1).
And sad but true, Staff Writer Melanie Anzidei apparently couldn't find a single North Jersey company that used the windfall from cheap fuel to raise employees' pay (B-1).
On the Opinion front, Columnist Mike Kelly asks, "Did Saudi Arabia pay for 9/11 attacks" (O-1).
But Kelly never mentions what Americans have know for more than a decade:
Osama bin Laden was born in Saudia Arabia to the family of a billionaire and founded al-Qaida -- which claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attack -- after funneling arms, money and fighters into Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet Union.
Second look
Last week, The Record ran a glowing story on how a developer will save $1 million by using a space-saving carousel parking system when an office building at 210 Main St. in Hackensack is converted into apartments.
But the story didn't make clear the elevator-like steel structure won't be enclosed.
A photo of the Parkmatic structure on the front of Friday's edition of the Hackensack Chronicle shows just how ugly this space saver will be.
