The F-word has given way to the T-word as Obama is hit with Trumped-up charges

Jimmy Margulies, former editorial cartoonist at The Record of Woodland Park, calls President Trump's proposed tax cuts "hush money" for Republican members of Congress.

On the indictment of Trump former campaign manager Paul Manafort in the probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Margulies quotes Trump as saying: "He knows what he signed up for," using the same words he uttered to the widow of a black American soldier killed in Niger.

37% OF AMERICANS APPROVE

OF HOW TRUMP IS DOING HIS JOB

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Donald J. Trump has an approval rating "demonstrably lower than any previous chief executive at this point in his presidency over seven decades of polling," The Washington Post says.

A few days short of the first anniversary of his victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, "fewer than 4 in 10 Americans -- 37 percent -- say they approve of the way he is handling his job," the newspaper reports.

In short, we're Trumped (or as I would have said before his election, we're fucked).

Post reporters Dan Balz and Scott Clement note:

"Trump's approval rating has changed little over the past four months, which have included tumultuous events, from hurricanes to legislative setbacks to indictments in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation into the role Russia played in the 2016 election.

"The president's disapproval rating has reached 59 percent, with 50 percent saying they strongly disapprove of the job he is doing. While little has changed since the summer, both represent the worst marks of his presidency."

Read the full Washington Post report:

Trump lags behind tepid expectations

Attacking Obama

In recent months, our deeply unpopular president has continued to attack or dismantle policies of Barack Obama, often leveling Trumped-up charges against our first black president.

Trump usually lies outright or distorts Obama's record as he attacks the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulation, trade agreements, tax policy and more.

He also takes credit for a healthy economy, even though just about everyone else notes we are in the ninth year of a recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 that Obama initiated.

What is especially strange is the confluence of the name Trump and the phrase "trumped-up charges," which are "fabricated," "spurious" or "fraudulently concocted," according to MerriamWebster.com.

In other words, trumped-up charges or evidence are made up. Yet, the phrase has been traced back to its first known use in 1728.

That anticipates the embodiment of trumped-up charges by nearly 290 years. Astounding.

Sexual harassment

Today, the front page of The Record explores the growing outrage over sexual harassment of women that began with revelations about Trump, and exploded with charges against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, as first reported by The New York Times (1A, 6A and 7A).

"That, in large part, is because of a simple hashtag that has taken social media by storm: #MeToo.

"The hashtag is tied to a movement started a decade ago," says reporter Melanie Anzidel, "but it exploded on social media on Oct. 15, when actress Alyssa Milano asked her followers to reply to her tweet with 'me too' if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted."

Anzidel also relates the reaction to her own #MeToo experience, which she posted on Facebook (6A).

Election of Trump 

The lead story by reporter Svetlana Shkolnikova says women began coming forward several years ago, when the Obama administration "led a national dialogue about sexual violence on college campuses" (6A).

"But it was the election of President Donald Trump, accused by multiple women of sexual assault and caught bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, that mobilized women even more."

The Record makes no attempt to explain why Weinstein's career has crashed and burned, but Trump was elected despite his boasting about sexually harassing and assaulting women.

And a headline on Page 1 says incorrectly:

"MeToo, Trump

embolden women

to speak out about

sexual harassment" 

I don't think it's correct to credit Trump with giving women the courage or confidence to speak out; the day after his inauguration, as the story reports, millions of protesters around the world marched in support of women's rights.

Both of the stories on sexual harassment of women carry the bylines of reporters over a fictitious publication, "North Jersey Record."

Racist Trump keeping promise to destroy everything President Obama had achieved

Republicans haven't been able to agree on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, so President Trump is trying to destroy it on his own, as seen in this cartoon by Dave Granlund.

Cartoonist Jimmy Margulies notes Puerto Ricans want the same treatment as other Americans as they try to recover from Hurricane Maria, but not when it comes to health care.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

President Trump is finding new ways of exacting revenge for the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Barack Obama, our first black president.

Last week, he added the North American trade agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and the Affordable Care Act to his hit list.

According to a PBS documentary aired 17 days before his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump's burning desire to be elected president can be traced to the April 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Obama had provided his birth certificate to the news media, and set out to humiliate Trump, who was in the audience after spending weeks attacking the president for allegedly not being born in the United States, and possibly being a Muslim.

"But that night, in front of Washington's journalists, politicians and power brokers, Obama would hit back," FRONTLINE reported:

Humiliated by Obama at press dinner, 

Trump is getting his revenge

Obama's race a factor

"Trump's entire political life -- dating all the way back to his adoption of birtherism earlier this decade -- is positioned against all things Obama," Chris Cillizza of CNN reported on Friday.

"Why? Because for many Trump supporters in this country, Obama -- and his beliefs about society and government -- were the antithesis of what they believed.

"(Yes, Obama's race -- and multicultural vision of the country and the world -- were part of that mix as well)."

Court challenges

An especially weak area in the news coverage of Trump is the lack of reporting on all of the court challenges to his executive orders and other actions, and where those lawsuits stand.

Reporters also are reluctant to challenge Trump in person.

That allows him to make it up as he goes along -- exaggerating, fabricating and lying outright in the sound bites we are assaulted with whenever we watch TV or listen to radio news.

I actually heard him say one reason he is trying to eliminate the subsidies health insurance companies get from government is because the insurers don't support him.

He also claimed they are using the money to boost their stock prices.

Puerto Rico

Nor have many reporters stated flatly that Trump's mistreatment of the 3.4 million Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria was motivated by the quirky fact that although they are U.S. citizens, they can't vote for president.

More than 700,000 Puerto Ricans left the island between 2006 and 2015, fleeing the economic decline and mounting debt crisis, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Some people also moved back, but the island saw the total number of residents drop to 3.4 million from 3.8 million -- more than 10%, the newspaper said.

Cartoonist Pat Bagley of The Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune questions why Donald J. Trump was treated differently than Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, a big Democratic donor.

Cartoonist Monte Wolverton of The Plain Truth magazine highlights one of the many ways Trump and his family have profited from his election.

Papers like The Record, which rarely explores issues, are real enemy of people

Deirdre Sykes, left, former editor of The Record, will end a 30-year career at the daily newspaper on March 24, according to a New York Post report. Sykes was promoted to editor in January 2016, only to be demoted seven months later by Gannett Co., new owners of North Jersey Media Group, which publishes the paper.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Readers are hungry for reporting on such issues as health care, a cleaner environment and local property taxes.

But in the past decade or so, The Record of Woodland Park has been playing up partisan politics in New Jersey and the nation to such an extent that issues are rarely discussed.

Now that President Trump has moved to repeal the Affordable Care Act, revive the coal industry and water down environmental controls, editors continue to cover protests in the same old way.

Why compare people pushing back against Trump policies to the Tea Party, the radical Republican group that claimed President Obama's national health insurance plan was a modern-day Holocaust?

And it's not enough for The Record's editorial board to declare, as it does today, "Improve the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. Do not repeal it. This is about health care, not politics" (16A).

Christie sabotage

The editorial board sat on their hands when Governor Christie sought to sabotage the law by refusing to set up a state health-care exchange several years ago, reducing residents' choice of insurance policies.

And Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin did the same when Republicans in Congress tried and failed dozens of times to repeal the 2010 law.

Last Saturday, Trump called the media "the enemy of the American people."

That prompted a New York Times reader to write a letter to the editor:

"You've got to hand it to Donald Trump. He knows how to use the media to his advantage. It was candidate Trump who received at least $2 billion worth of media coverage with his dramatics on the campaign trail.

"Now, President Trump uses the media again, this time denigrating the media for reporting what they see. He creates 'the enemy,' because he needs to avoid substantive comments on real issues, and his oft-repeated 'believe me' can be the only truth his followers hear."

Front page news?

The Record's reaction to all the push back has been inconsistent, as least judging from the front page.

On Wednesday's front page, Staff Writer Lindy Washburn finally delivered a story on the devastating impact of an ACA repeal on more than 1 million New Jersey seniors covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

And most of the rest of the page was devoted to Trump ordering a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants, and reaction from supporters and opponents. 

But a local issue, whether Ramsey's Planning Board will allow a large indoor firing range to operate in town, is wrongly portrayed as a "Second Amendment fight" and a "battleground over the Second Amendment," which Trump has vowed to defend (Wednesday's 1A).

It's nothing of the kind. The town isn't challenging the so-called right of gun owners to bear arms or trying to take away their firearms.

It just doesn't want gun owners coming to Ramsey in large numbers. Who can blame town officials?

Imagine the potential for an accidental discharge of a firearm or a road rage incident where two gun owners decide to start shooting. 

Readers shocked

Most of today's front page is wasted on whether Christie will take over when "longtime afternoon drive host Mike Francesca [who?] retires from WFAN 660-AM, " a sports-talk radio station (1A).

I long ago stopped listening to AM static, and I'm no sports fan, but does "shock jock" in the headline refer to a jock strap?

Christie has executed more than 500 vetoes since 2009 -- surely setting a record for a governor of New Jersey -- but Staff Writer Dustin Racioppi of The Record still hasn't reported on all the damage they have caused or even discussed the issues involved in any detail.

Most of them were reported as Christie v. the Democrats who control the state Legislature.

The GOP thug screwed the middle and working classes in New Jersey, but took credit for the expansion of Medicaid after he accepted hundreds of millions of federal dollars to do so.

And after Bridgegate and all those vetoes, who cares what he does when he leaves office. Good riddance.

Deirdre Sykes

Gannett has announced that former Editor Deirdre Sykes is leaving The Record on March 24. 

See: Sykes spent years fighting her way to top

The Record, other media failed miserably to report support for U.S. health-care law

A cartoon by Dave Granlund, above, explores charges that President Trump is acting like a dictator. 

Cartoonist Ed Wexler's "Donny's Daddy?" suggests Trump is in awe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who allegedly helped elect the tax-dodging New York billionaire on Nov. 8.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The groundswell of support for President Obama's Affordable Care Act seems to have come out of nowhere.

That's because until a month or so ago, when Donald J. Trump moved to repeal the 2010 law, all The Record did was channel Republicans' racially motivated attacks on what they cursed as "Obamacare," a word newspaper headline writers came to love despite the bias it reflects.

Today, Staff Writer Lindy Washburn reports repeal of the law may expose 810,000 New Jersey seniors on Medicare to "higher out-of-pocket costs," end $4 billion in federal spending in the state and cut 86,000 jobs (1A).

On another issue dominating the front page -- Trump's crackdown on all illegal immigrants, even those who haven't committed crimes -- when will the Woodland Park daily finally investigate the glacial legal immigration system (1A)?

The path from Green Card to citizenship often takes up to 5 years, and the system is so complex many legal immigrants hire lawyers they can't afford to help them navigate the forms, and repeated requests for information. 

In fact, the bureaucratic legal immigration system is believed to be a major cause of illegal immigration.

Old man Trump

Trump turned 70 last June and became the oldest person to hold the office of president about a month ago, so some commentators are blaming his age for all of the crazy things he says.

Black History Month began Feb. 1, but the president only visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on Tuesday.

USA Today reports Trump denounced anti-Semitism, even though his campaign attracted "an unusually high number of anti-Semites and white nationalists" (9A).

And in the annual proclamation on International Holocaust Day this month , Trump forgot to mention the 6 million Jews who died.

Jet-set food

Food Editor Esther Davidowitz should be ashamed of Tuesday's front-page promo and her breathless report on Gourmet Inflight Catering of Wood-Ridge.

The Better Living cover showed CEO Harry Purut holding the "smoked salmon tray" served to celebrities and "other multi-millionaires" who fly on private jets.

Big deal. Don't we eat much of the same food? What's the point of the story, except to give the caterer free advertising?

Davidowitz even managed to get in a plug for the Italian-American restaurant run by Purut's partner and chef brother-in-law.

The Record: Columnist misses the point about growing protests of Trump policies

Cartoons by Rick McKee of The Augusta Chronicle, above, and Darly Cagle of Cagle.com explore President Trump's attacks against federal judges and leaks about his campaign's contact with Russia.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

What's the point of drawing parallels between the growing protests against President Trump and the "tumultuous late 1960s," as Columinst Mike Kelly does on Page 1 of The Record today?

Kelly claims that experts "are now looking to the late 1960s and early 1970s for insights and possible lessons" (1A and 7A).

It's much too early for that, seeing as the protests began with the Nov. 8 election of a candidate many saw as unfit to hold the office of president.

They continued during the transition, and escalated 30 days ago, when Trump was inaugurated and began signing executive orders to bar Muslims from entering the United States, roll back environmental protections and take other actions.

His Cabinet appointees also have elicited widespread condemnation, and his national security adviser resigned after he lied about contacts with Russia during the campaign.

Just politics?

The news media might do better reporting that the widespread protests against Trump are unprecedented in the modern era against a sitting president.

The Record and other media have insisted for years all of this is grounded in partisan politics -- just Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives butting heads.

No. Issues matter, too.

As the Environmental Defense Fund says, "Nobody voted for more pollution."

Obama's 'lesson'

If we need to look for "lessons," President Obama provided a big one before he left office: Elections matter.

Tens of millions of Americans didn't vote, and that threw the election to a billionaire businessman who many say is mentally ill, a pathological liar, a racist and more.

At a press conference last Thursday, Trump claimed in comments to an Orthodox Jewish reporter, "I am the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen."

To me, that sounds like he acknowledges his anti-Semitism, but claims it's no big deal.

He also asked a black reporter, a woman, to set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus. 

Fethullah Gulen

"WHO IS FETHULLAH GULEN?"

The danger of running this banner headline on the front page today is that many readers won't care, even if they attempted to plow through nearly three pages of a related "special investigation" in the Sunday edition. 

One thing notable about the investigation is the byline of Jean Rimbach, who managed to hold onto her job despite being the least productive staff reporter at The Record in the past decade. 

Food trends?

Somehow, Staff Writer Sophia F. Gottfried researched and wrote a long Better Living cover article today on food trends without ever mentioning most of the fare served in restaurants is raised on industrial farms with harmful antibiotics and growth hormones, and fed animal byproducts (bits of dead animals).

Many cattle raised for beef are fed chicken-house waste mixed in with their feed, according to Consumer Reports magazine. 

That fattens the bottom line of restaurant owners, who have lagged behind supermarkets in offering organic or other naturally raised or grown food to their customers.

Breaking news: A big snowstorm hits suburbs of North Jersey in February!

WINTER WONDERLAND: Euclid Avenue in Hackensack around 8:30 this morning, above and below.

FIRST PASS: I saw one city snowplow pass our house before I went outside to shovel our sidewalk and a path to the mailbox. I'm guessing 5 inches to 6 inches of snow had fallen.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Delivery of The Record of Woodland Park is being delayed by the snowstorm this morning so we turned on the TV and watched CBS2.

Thanks to a small fleet of enormous SUVs, the news station's reporters were able to fan out throughout the metropolitan area, and deliver incisive reporting like this:

"There's no one out," one woman reported from a downtown Ridgewood sidewalk. "Oh, there's an NJ Transit bus passing."

In the city, a reporter on the scene, and the anchors and a weatherman back in the studio, commented on how the front wheels of a Cadillac sedan were spinning as the driver attempted to get out of his parking space.

The camera was trained on the car for several minutes, and one clucked that the driver wasn't using the "rocking" technique to exit the space.

SNOW BLANKET: A neighbor's minivan.

Trump and judges

CBS This Morning reported President Trump is facing criticism from his Supreme Court nominee.

In a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, Judge Neil Gorsuch called Trump's attacks on the federal judge who blocked his controversial travel ban "disheartening and demoralizing."

The judge's comments were leaked by Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator the judge met with.

Nothing new?

Then, another CBS This Morning reporter did a piece, claiming other presidents have criticized federal judges in the same way as Trump has.

But in her report, Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford didn't bother to make an important distinction:

Trump has criticized federal judges who have ruled against him or his policies, such as in the Trump University case, and the ban on immigrants and refugees.

The reporter compared President Obama to Trump, noting Obama "berated" Supreme Court justices who were sitting in front of him during his State of the Union address in 2010.

But Obama wasn't criticizing them for a ruling against him or his policies -- he attacked the high court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission:

"Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limits in our elections," Obama said, predicting how corporate money has poisoned the legislative process.

Editors blocked health-insurance success stories until Trump moved to repeal law

Staff Writer John Cichowski, The Record's so-called commuting columnist, rarely ventures far from his computer, preferring to rewrite press releases, as on today's Local front, or publishing emails from readers. He's too lazy to ride trains and buses to report on the quality of service. Above and below, NJ Transit's double-decker rail cars at Newark Penn Station.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

"HOPE, DREAD, UNCERTAINTY"

This headline on Page 1 of The Record today does a great job of summing up the emotions of roughly 800,000 New Jersey residents after President Trump started the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Still, many readers are questioning why the Woodland Park daily is only now publishing success stories about former President Obama's signature health-care law (1A and 8A).

Staff Writer Lindy Washburn, the paper's veteran medical writer, doesn't report how many of those 800,000 New Jerseyans have health coverage for the first time.

Nor do readers learn how many want to see the law repealed or expanded.

A poll released in December by the Kaiser Family Foundation found only 26 percent of Americans were in favor of full repeal of the law, while 30 percent favor expanding it, according to NPR.

The poll found Americans continue to be divided along partisan lines about the law.

"Few brag about having Obamacare," Washburn writes, using the pejorative favored by Republicans who have repeatedly tried but failed to repeal the law since 2010.

Success stories

The story is filled with photos of smiling people whose coverage pays for care in their battles with breast cancer, debilitating heart disease and other conditions.

As in her past coverage, Washburn doesn't mention much of the confusion in New Jersey resulted from Governor Christie's attempt to sabotage the law by refusing to set up a state marketplace for purchase of insurance policies.

Instead, New Jersey residents were thrown onto an overburdened federal marketplace, and their choice of heath insurers has been severely limited. 

However, Christie did take credit for expanding Medicaid for low-income New Jersey residents, but relied completely on federal funds to do so.

Refugee ban

Another Page 1 story today reports Christie called the "rollout" of Trump's executive order temporarily blocking refugees from entering the country "terrible" (1A).

What the story doesn't mention is that after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Christie sought to bar all Syrian refugees, including children, from entering the United States.

That was followed by Record stories reporting that churches and social service groups defied the GOP thug, and settled Syrian refugees in North Jersey.

Free electric charging stations in the municipal garage in downtown Englewood.

Local news?

The Record today publishes three stories about Englewood, all by Staff Writer Michael W. Curley Jr. 

Two of the stories explore the many vacant storefronts in downtown Englewood, and a rise of bullying in the small city's public schools (1L and 6L).

But Curley -- and the editors who handled the first story before it was published -- downplay high rents as a leading factor in business vacancies.

The story on bullying in the schools doesn't mention that a bigger problem is segregation -- Englewood's elementary and middle schools are attended by few white students, and desegregation efforts apparently have been focused solely on the high school. 

For past commentary

 on The Record, see:

Eye on The Record

Trump-speak for lies -- alternative facts, truthful hyperbole --flummoxes media

From cartoonist Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

One look at the huge Pompton Lakes story on Page 1 today clearly shows the editors of The Record are fiddling while Washington, D.C., burns.

Completion of Phase 1 of a lake cleanup isn't news outside the small Passaic County community -- especially in view of all of the lies the Trump administration has been peddling since the inauguration on Friday.

Even more troubling is President Trump's attempt to dismantle the Obama administration's clean-energy and clean-water initiatives.

The editorial board in Woodland Park hasn't commented on the lies or the assault on the environment.

But today, OP-Ed Columnist David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote:

"The Trump administration -- and the president himself -- have shown a shocking disregard for the truth in their first days on the job.

"This disregard puts the media in a tricky spot, because calling out the president of the United States and his staff for untruths will inevitably upset his supporters.

"But the media cannot waver. We cannot use euphemisms for 'false' and 'untrue' when those are the accurate terms."

'Alternative facts'

Trump White House adviser and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway likely told more lies than the candidate himself, if you can imagine that.

Now, she is labeling the shocking disregard for the truth shown by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, as "alternative facts."

They go perfectly with the president's own "truthful hyperbole," including the dark vision in his inaugural speech of "American carnage."

The environment

Trump's "America First Energy Plan" includes reviving the coal industry, which would ensure we'd have to deal with elevated levels of mercury in fish for years to come.

Coal generating plants contaminate water sources with methylmercury, which is absorbed into the body of fish.

Click here for commentary from the Gas2 blog, "America First Energy Plan Puts Americans Last."

Class v. crass

In a Sunday opinion column, editorial writer Bruce Lowry "looks back once more at the class act that was the Obama presidency" (Sunday's 2O).

Lowry doesn't contrast Obama with the crass Trump (stupid, coarse, gross, etc.); his former supermodel wife's nude photos; or the rest of the family, including children from two other wives.

But he does recall Trump's so-called birther lie that Obama was not actually a U.S. citizen, and shouldn't be able to hold the office of president.

Lowry says Trump's charge carried "racial overtones."

Our next prez -- a filthy rich con man and tax dodger -- will make America hate again

Supporters of  Donald J. Trump denounced a cartoon from Jim Morin, showing the president-elect beating Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights hero who says he is boycotting the inauguration of an "illegitimate" president.

EYE ON THE RECORD

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Make no mistake. 

My use of the word "prez" in the headline just bought me room for "con man" and "tax dodger," but, alas, "pussy grabber" didn't fit.

I certainly didn't intend to confer on billionaire Donald J. Trump any of the coolness of the late, great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who was called "Prez" and "The President" by his fellow musicians.

The inauguration of Trump on Friday will end government for all as we knew it under President Obama, and usher in a period of racism, hate speech and division unlike anything we've seen before.

The Record today carries the fifth and final installment of "Trump Tracker," a series in which the editors and reporters try to predict how a Trump administration will affect 14 issues important to North Jersey residents and businesses (1A and 10A).

They intend to update the stories "at least once every three months." 

That's hardly enough, especially if they spend the rest of the time merely reporting partisan politics and sound bites -- as they have done for the entire Obama administration, as well as during Governor Christie's tenure.

#TeamRecord

On 11A today, readers get a foreshadowing of how The Record of Woodland Park will cover the Trump inauguration, written by Elise Toribio, who is identified as "social-mobile editor" or do they mean "mobile social editor"?  

Poor Toribio reports that Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States "in front of thousands of Americans on the National Mall."

"Thousands"? One estimate is that 900,000 people will attend the ceremony. 

Toribio urges readers "to follow our reporters and photographers on their social channels ... for live updates before, during and after the event." 

Unfortunately, many older readers of The Record don't have smartphones or follow Twitter and other social media.

A dozen staff reporters or columnists and four photographers will be in Washington for the inauguration.

When their work appears in the print edition on Saturday and Sunday, much of it will be largely ignored by readers who watched hours of coverage and commentary on TV.

Obama farewell

In his final news conference, Obama told the White House press corps, "You're not supposed to be sycophants, you're supposed to be skeptics" (12A).

The president appeared to be urging them to "be skeptics" during the Trump administration. 

Many Americas are disappointed the press corps, as well as print, radio and TV reporters, acted like sycophants during the campaign, hoping to gain advantage with Trump and his supporters.

Regulations

In his story on Trump reducing federal rules today, Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson reports "exactly what regulations will be rolled back and what businesses or individuals will be affected remain unclear" (1A).

That's quite a journalistic cop-out from a veteran reporter, who could have discussed regulation of the auto industry that affects nearly everyone.

Trump officials are expected to side with automakers who are pushing back against the latest fuel-mileage standards from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Auto emissions kill 53,000 people a year and aggravate climate change, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the upstart who is leading the movement to all-electric vehicles.

And no one wants to see a reduction in auto-safety regulations in view of the thousands of Americans killed by defective air bags, tires, cars and trucks in recent decades. 

Affordable housing

Page 1 of The Record today carries a decision from the state Supreme Court that is almost as significant as the landmark Mount Laurel rulings in 1975 and 1983.

The high court ruled towns must allow developers to build affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families "whose needs were ignored for more than 16 years" (1A).

The justices rejected arguments from several towns, the Christie administration and the League of Municipalities, State House Bureau reporter Salvador Rizzo reports.

But this story and previous accounts largely avoid the racial angle -- most of the people who live in affordable housing are black and Hispanic, and many towns oppose accommodating those minorities.