Adding to its reputation for journalistic “excellence,”
today’s Journal News editorial says Phil Amicone was on
the Yonkers City Council with Vincenza Restiano.

Nice going, JN. Amicone was deputy mayor for eight
years—- and was NEVER a member of the City Council.

You asked a question about RNN hiring a News 12 political commentator? LOL. RNN-JN TV has not one clue about how to do a newscast. I’m afraid it would take more than your opining to irrigate that wasteland of a program.

Not that News 12 is much good either, mind you. But the JN’s not covering a real news story because it wasn’t invited to sit on a TV debate panel shows how juvenile and self-interested it is. At the same time, Cable News should have been less immature itself, and invited a JN reporter to participate.

Bottom line—- the public is consistently ill-served by both “media” outlets.

Thanks for NOT mentioning the Guardian, which falls into its own category—- lowest of the low.

Based on its clearly established pattern, the Journal News
should be busted for impersonating a newspaper.

When asked by an angry resident why the Journal News didn’t report any of this, the reporter responded that these were just allegations and that she’d just wait to see what the Ethics Board does before reporting anything. Sounds maybe reasonable unless you know that the Ethics Board, of course, is still debating what to do about an inquiry made in the fall of 2004 about a March 2004 Feiner fundraiser. In other words, the Journal News felt this was information about Feiner its readers should not have.

Yet this same reporter has no problem reporting Feiner’s own allegations—not just against other town officials, but against private citizens too. Even the reporter’s blog entry above gushes about allegations that Morgan plans to make before the town’s Ethics Board.

But should residents of Greenburgh be told that a resident has now documented the fact that Feiner received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from developers with active applications? Not if they read the Journal News.

What’s really too bad, though, is the absence of any coverage by the Journal News of the real issues in Greenburgh. For example, on the eve of a hotly contested primary, the town’s comptroller, Jim Heslop, has just quit—making him the third comptroller in four years to leave. The other two who left were quoted in the New York Times two years ago as saying they found it impossible to work with Feiner. Greenburgh operates a $70 million budget. There have been huge controversies this year over a $500,000 slush fund, the town’s failure to record most of the WestHELP rent as revenues in the town budget, and the town’s inability to reach consensus on what gets charged town-wide and what gets charged to unincorporated area taxpayers only.

Doesn’t the Journal News think voters should know about Heslop’s quitting and his reasons for doing so?

There are other stories that could be reported too. For example, Feiner has flip-flopped on the issue of whether he spent any of the slush fund money. A few residents, however, have FOILed the town’s disbursement ledger for the period immediately after the town received its first big WestHELP payment in August 2003 and found a number of unusual disbursements to a series of individuals and even to Radio City for tickets! Some think this looks like “walking around money.” But nothing gets reported in the Journal News.

The same is true about the problems on East Hartsdale Avenue. Most of the businesses that were affected have filed notices of claim against the Town for millions of dollars based on alleged negligence. They’re relying on documents showing that the Town has known for years about the inadequate drainage infrastructure serving that area. But the Journal News makes no mention of this huge potential liability. Don’t you think voters have a right to know about this?

In fact, the businesses on East Hartsdale Avenue are just as vulnerable to a flood today as they were on April 15, when the nor’easter hit. The person who knew the most about this was the town engineer—Mike Lepree—but he quit two months ago, and hasn’t been replaced. Here, too, the Journal News never bothered to report either his leaving, his reasons for leaving, his recommendations for what should have been done, and the fact that he hasn’t been replaced.

Instead of writing about important matters like these, we get non-stories about candidates complaining about unfair compaigning which even the media doesn’t care about, much less the public.