David Halbfinger

"New Jersey voters deserved a better race this year than the nearly invisible contest between Senator Frank Lautenberg and Richard Zimmer, his Republican challenger," begins the New York Times' endorsement of U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

Although accurate, a generous interpretation of this seemingly hypocritical charge is that it is in fact a veiled criticism of their own paper's decision to ignore the U.S. Senate race in New Jersey. Not once has the Times written a story about the general election contest between Frank Lautenberg and Dick Zimmer. (By comparison, Cynthia Burton at the Philadelphia Inquirer has written 11 pieces on the race.)

To add insult to injury, Zimmer told PolitickerNJ: "One of the editors of the New York Times who interviewed me for their editorial thought I was still a member of Congress."

An observation on how the New York Times’ coverage of New Jersey has changed over the years: when Bergen County Republican Chairman Anthony Statile resigned in 1973, the New York Times wrote five separate stories on the special election to replace him – but did not cover the passage of the state budget in 2008. The promotion of David Chen from Trenton to New York City Hall ends a chain of highly influential New Jersey-based New York Times reporters (like Joseph Sullivan, Ronald Sullivan, David Halbfinger and David Kocieniewski) that influenced New Jersey politics as much as any in-state newspaper. As recently as 2001 and 2002, the NYT played a key role in ending the political careers of Gov. Donald DiFrancesco and U.S. Sen. Bob Torricelli.

Anthony Imperiale

On August 14, 1968, one year after racial tensions ignited the Newark riot, a Special Election was held in thirteen Newark voting districts that each elected four people to a special Community Council to administer the Federal Model Cities Program. This was the second community council election; the first, held the previous April, was invalidated after charges of fraud. The program affected Newark's Central Ward, which had the largest Black population in city, as well as parts of the North and West Wards.

That election featured two well-known candidates who had emerged as civic leaders during Newark's post-riot era: Anthony Imperiale, who ran a group of vigilantes, and LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka), a poet and civil rights leader.