Is NJ’s Seafood Safe to Eat?

Media Madness & Moran’s Lament

Losing the Forest in the Oyster

Bear with me – I’ll get to the seafood safety issue.

Yesterday, in a piece on Gov. Christie, Star Ledger columnist Tom Moran amazingly expressed this frustration:

As a Jersey guy watching this national race, it drives me nuts that so little attention has focused on Christie’s abysmal record as governor.

I say amazingly because the Star Ledger – in both news and editorial – was part of the media circus that inflated the Christie balloon, by ignoring the substance of his record in favor of cheerleading, particularly with respect to Christie’s Sandy Self Promotion.

The NJ media created the Christie monster, in large part by ignoring his record as Governor, so it takes some set of stones to imply that the “national race” is not focusing on Christie’s record.

In fact, just the opposite is true – with the exception of some great work by the Bergen Record, WNYC, NJ Spotlight (energy & environment, not Sandy!), and Bob Braun (education) – virtually all of the critical Christie news coverage has come from national media outlets, who wrote stories the NJ press corps either missed or didn’t have the spine to write.

And even when the coverage was critical of Christie – NJ or national media –  the focus almost invariably was limited to the scandal story, not the policy or government corruption story that required real investigative journalism.

As a Jersey Guy who’s been writing and feeding the NJ media these substantive stories and been ignored for 5 years, like Moran said  “it drives me nuts”.

For example, the recent Record story on corporate contributions to Choose NJ paying for the Governor’s London trip did not investigate the quid pro quo benefits those corporations received from Christie’s administration. That’s a huge investigative story that remains to be written.

Same thing in the NY Times piece on Christie’s appetite for luxury, which included this informative photo:

(Source: NY TImes)

So, with that context in mind, and perhaps my naive expectation that Moran’s lament might signal a shift at the Star Ledger to substantive issue coverage, a headline in the Ledger today caught my eye: “NJ’s Oyster Madness”.

Wow, could this issue finally be getting attention? Would the Star Ledger redeem prior coverage that missed the huge NJ seafood safety story in pursuit of the misdirection, i.e. the story about the DEP ban on the NY/NJ Baykeeper’s oyster restoration?

Let me explain with a little of the history.

Way back at the beginning of the Christie administration, with inexperienced rookie Bob Martin at the helm at DEP and under his boss’ order to get DEP off the back of business, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a scathingly critical Report about deficiencies in NJ’s seafood safety program (called the Shellfish Sanitation Program).

FDA found huge deficiencies that put the public health at risk and required more resources and staff invested in NJ’s programs.

That was the opposite direction Gov. Christie was headed at DEP, in seeking to scale back staff, cut budgets, impose a moratorium on regulations, and rollback DEP regulatory intervention in NJ’s business.

FDA  threatened to shut down NJ’s entire billion dollar seafood industry if those deficiencies were not corrected.

Now that is a huge story. The oyster restoration research is the flea on the elephant’s tail.

I tried to get it to reporters at the time in this series of posts and press releases:

But all they wanted to write was the DEP ban on the NY/NJ Baykeeper research.

Did the FDA issues and needed reforms get reported at the time? Not really. [* in a closer review of the history, I note that the Star Ledger did write a story and editorial, Kirk Moore at APP did as well. ]

Have the real underlying problems previously identified by FDA in NJ’s shellfish sanitation program be resolved since then?

Is NJ’s seafood safe to eat? Can we get a followup story on that?

Don’t you think that’s just a little more important that an oyster restoration research project?

Ask Brian Donohue and his editors at the Star Ledger – be sure to mention Moran’s lament.