The Oregonianhas announced a new editor, Mark Katches. The previous editor, Peter Bhatia, is moving to academia after 20 years with the newspaper. The Oregonian took a sharp turn to the right about 20 years ago, and changed from being a highly respected journal to a right wing rag that lost all journalistic integrity, as well as most of its readership. Will this be a change for the better? Follow me over the fold for the results of my investigations.
According to the bio in the Oregonian, Mark Katches has led an investigative outfit called The Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation's largest watchdog reporting organization.
Prior to his position at The Center for Investigative Reporting, Katches spent three years as the lead editor for investigative reporting at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where his team won Pulitzer Prizes in 2008 and 2010 for local reporting. Before joining the Journal Sentinel, Katches worked for 10 years at The Orange County Register. He was an enterprise and investigative reporter and team leader at the Register.
I did a brief Google search, and found that he has
investigated all sorts of things, and could find no indication of right wing bias. The CIR has investigated underwater nuclear testing, cheap handguns and ethics violations by Bush-nominated judges, among other things.
So is the Oregonian going to return to its roots as a great newspaper? And if it does, will it survive? It has recently gone down to printing only four days a week, although it is online the other three days. No one I know subscribes now because it is so pathetic, maybe this will change that. Or maybe there is something else I didn't find. The Orange County Register is a red flag, after all. If there is more information, maybe it will show up in the comments.