Bob Torricelli is Mad at the Big, 'Mean' Bergen Record

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By John Koblin

July 3, 2008 | 5:15 p.m

Bob Torricelli announces he won't run for reelection after a Senate panel admonished him for accepting gifts from a campaign contributor.

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Bob Torricelli, the former senator from New Jersey who didn't seek re-election after his first term because, well, we know why!, has an interesting view of the reason The Record of Bergen County is having trouble, and it's not, he thinks, the troubled newspaper industry in general. News that the newspaper recently had to close its Hackensack office seemed to delight him because, as he wrote in his column on PolitickerNJ, "somewhere the Record stopped becoming a mirror of the happy suburban life and it became mean."

He's no media expert--although he may be an expert on the Record after all the ink the newspaper gave him back in 2002--but he gives the newspaper 10 years to live. Without irony, he writes:

I won't be shedding any tears for the Record. Bergen County will be a better place without it but I regret what it did to itself. It didn't have to be.

Words apt for many occasions, we suppose.