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| The campaign office for Barbara Buono and Milly Silva on Cedar Lane in Teaneck. |
By Victor E. Sasson
Editor
If Democrat Barbara Buono fails today to unseat the worst New Jersey governor ever, she can blame the legions of apathetic morons who sit on the sidelines and allow the right wing to seize the high ground.
The real poison in our democracy -- a story The Record has rarely told -- are registered voters too lazy to get off their asses and go to the polls or even apply for a mail-in ballot.
Their corrosive influence can be seen in every local and state election, but in months of election coverage, The Record hasn't bothered to interview a single voter.
Democratic edge
With a 700,000 edge in registered voters, apathy is likely the leading explanation for how a Democrat running for governor loses in New Jersey.
Of course, in 2009, when Republican Chris Christie won his first term as governor, the electorate fell for the Big Lie that he would lower property taxes.
Instead of his first term being one of compromise and bipartisanship, Christie likely employed the veto more than any other previous governor.
And The Record, which insists on calling him "popular," has distinguished itself as little more than a public-relations apparatus for the GOP bully.
What about voters?
Instead of speaking to voters, Editor Marty Gottlieb and his gang of lazy columnists and reporters have spun endless tales, predicting the outcome of the gubernatorial election based on so-called experts, pundits, polls, politics and fund-raising totals.
I picked up a real newspaper on Monday, The New York Times, and found four large color photos of Brooklyn residents and a story on their views of the mayoral election in New York City.
Imagine that.
Steve Waldman, 65, a computer supplier, is quoted as saying the last presidential candidate he voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey, and the last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch.
(That's pronounced "Kotch," not "Coke," as in the evil Koch brothers behind Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing group that is financing GOP attack ads).
The Times did its interviews in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where only about half of the registered voters cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election, and less than a third voted for mayor in 2009.
A Times editorial on Monday urged New Jersey voters to approve a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage to $8.25 an hour, starting on Jan. 1, a move the greedy Borg publishing family opposed in a Record editorial.
Christie also vetoed a hike in the minimum for low-wage workers, one of the groups he likes to screw with his mean-spirited policies.
Today's paper
What dominates The Record's front page today? Not the election. The editors are already tired of that.
The top half of Page 1 carries a big, black headline:
Gunman strikes panic
in Garden State Plaza
Of course, the "panic" was in shoppers, not in the Paramus shopping center itself.
The phrase "at Garden State Plaza" would have conveyed that, but six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton missed the clunky headline.
Still, the real weakness in the story is that it fails to report the only one hurt was the alleged gunman, Richard Shoop, 20, the Teaneck man who police say committed suicide in the mall.
Who is to blame?
Was the paper's early deadlines or the five reporters who worked on the story or the editors to blame for that major omission?
Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza and the rest of the Woodland Park daily's local-news operation fails miserably almost every time to get to the law-enforcement sources who have the information readers demand.
This morning, the paper's Web site, NorthJersey.com, actually has the nerve to quote a neighbor of the Shoops as saying Richard was "a nice kid."
A correction on A-2 today acknowledges the misspelling of the name of a candidate in the Bogota Borough Council election.
How sloppy can Sforza get?
Hackensack news
The Local front today reports Hackensack High School finally got a new resource officer after the school board agreed to pay his salary (L-1).
The dysfunctional Board of Education is the last remnant of decades of Zisa family rule over Hackensack.
Sforza couldn't find enough local news to fill his section, so he resorted to a time-tested filler photo of a non-fatal auto accident (L-3).
As usual, the caption tells readers little, especially in this case, where Ridgewood police are quoted as saying the brakes on a relatively new Mazda SUV "failed."
Maybe, the driver "failed" to use the brakes and mistakenly hit the gas pedal instead.
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