More pandering to sports fans

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You can understand why approval of a medical marijuana bill dominates the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but why is former sports reporter John Brennan given Page 1 play for another, wildly sympathetic portrait of ex-Nets basketball player Jayson Williams?

Brennan -- who would make a good P.R. man for Williams -- again goes out of his way to hide the man's problems with alcohol, omitting any mention of the night of drinking in 2002 that preceded the fatal shooting of his driver, whose life was cut short at 55. I can't wait until Williams is in prison for his stupidity in showing off his loaded shotgun to friends.

The Williams story on A-1 forces the lazy, incompetent editors to give short shrift to passage of a land-use bill that is being portrayed by environmentalists as a giveaway to developers, shoving it inside to Page A-4.

Don't look for any municipal, education or developement news of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood or many other Bergen County towns in the Local section of the former Hackensack daily. But what is increasingly passing for local news takes up all of L-3 -- court, crime, accident and fire news -- and more of it appears on L-1 and L-2. You have to wonder what Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, the editor who heads the local assignement desk, is doing to earn her inflated salary.

But Hackensack residents, who live under the noisy flight paths of both Teterboro and Newark airports, and people in other towns inadvertently get good news in the Business section. Word that Teterboro flights and employment are falling mean less noise and a slightly better quality of life for tens of thousands of us. It's an issue the former Bergen Record and its reporters long have ignored. (Malcolm A. Borg, the bored chairman of North Jersey Media Group, was a powerful, vocal  advocate for an air museum at Teterboro in the mid-1980s. Now, all he and his children -- Publisher Stephen A. Borg and General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg -- do is count their money after downsizing The Record and cutting retiree medical benefits.)

I'm sure I speak for many who would like to see Teterboro serve only as a sales, training and maintenance hub, with virtually all flights shifted to other airports. After all, this is not essential aviation, but merely business executives, actors and hip-hop stars whose pampered behinds are transported in private jets. Maybe the rest of us would get more sleep.