Scott Moore

By Scott Moore
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Media Watch: A Tale of Two Pension Stories

How does editorial bias affect newspaper coverage? A pair of newspaper stories out today gives us a textbook example, highlighting the Oregonian’s use of the front page to push an editorial agenda against public employee pensions. 

By Scott Moore
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Media Watch: What Happens When the Press Stops Doing Its Job?

The folks over at Media Matters are blogging today about a new report that shows a troubling trend in the press:

When newspapers print the term “job killer” to describe a policy (for instance, on taxes, labor, and environmental regulations), 91.6 percent of the time they allow the claim to be made without any evidence or an authoritative source with any evidence.

Two university professors printed their findings in a report, based on nearly three decades of research on four major sources: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.

By Alina Harway
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The New Face of the Oregonian: A Five-Part Series

Last month, the Oregonian announced that they had hired the Bend Bulletin’s Erik Lukens to be the paper’s new Editorial Page Editor. At the time, we wrote that it signaled a further shift to the right for the state’s “paper of record.”

By Scott Moore
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The New Face of the Oregonian, Part 5: No Friend of Public Schools

This is Part Five of a five-part series looking at the new Editorial Page Editor of the Oregonian.

Upset about budget cuts that are devastating Oregon’s local schools? Don’t expect much help from the new head of the Oregonian Editorial Board, Erik Lukens.

While Lukens was at the helm of the Bend Bulletin’s Editorial Board, the paper published opinions about school funding and its advocates that ranged from indifferent to outright hostile.

Is that what we can now expect from the Oregonian?

The dramatic increase in budget cuts to K-12 schools over the past two years (piled on top of two decades of ongoing cuts) has sparked an emergence of frustrated parents, students, teachers and community members who are organizing to make a difference.

Portland-area groups like UPSET, Invest in Oregon Kids, Oregon SOS, and others have joined new and existing groups around the state calling on legislators to do something about our state’s school funding crisis. Ask anyone involved in our schools, and you’ll hear the same story: There’s a sense of anger, frustration, and motivation among people who care about our schools that hasn’t been felt in some time.

If past is prologue, these advocates won’t find an ally in Erik Lukens.

By Scott Moore
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The New Face of the Oregonian, Part 4: Attacking Social Security

Last month, the Oregonian announced that they had hired the Bend Bulletin’s Erik Lukens to be the paper’s new Editorial Page Editor. At the time, we wrote that it signaled a further shift to the right for the state’s “paper of record.”

By Alina Harway
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The New Face of the Oregonian, Part 3: "Down with Taxes (Unless You are Poor)"

Last month, the Oregonian announced that they had hired the Bend Bulletin’s Erik Lukens to be the paper’s new Editorial Page Editor. At the time, we wrote that it signaled a further shift to the right for the state’s “paper of record.”

In the weeks since, we’ve conducted research into the editorials that came out under Lukens’ direction and have found that it’s even more extreme than we originally thought. On every issue that matters to most Oregonians, Lukens and the Bulletin editorial board took a far-right position that is completely at odds with the Oregonian’s readership.

This is part three of a five-part series.

By Alina Harway
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The New Face of the Oregonian, Part 2: Kicking Working Families While They’re Down

Last month, the Oregonian announced that they had hired the Bend Bulletin’s Erik Lukens to be the paper’s new Editorial Page Editor. At the time, we wrote that it signaled a further shift to the right for the state’s “paper of record.”

In the weeks since, we’ve conducted research into the editorials that came out under Lukens’ direction and have found that it’s even more extreme than we originally thought. On every issue that matters to most Oregonians, Lukens and the Bulletin editorial board took a far-right position that is completely at odds with the Oregonian’s readership.

This is part two of a five-part series.

Across the state, the effects of the economic meltdown are still being felt by working- and middle-class families. While corporate profits have reached an all-time high, the recovery hasn’t yet reached those who struggling just to make ends meet.

And yet? Erik Lukens, the Oregonian’s newly hired Editorial Page Editor, thinks the problem is that poor people make too much money.

No, really. While he headed up the editorial page of the Bend Bulletin, Lukens repeatedly advocated for a wage cut for the poorest workers by cutting the minimum wage. Lukens & Co. believe that Oregon’s minimum wage law (passed by voters in 2002) should allow for cuts to the wages that the poorest workers make.

August 25, 2009: “Oregon’s minimum wage law is a bad idea whose time is coming around again. … Don’t expect the minimum wage to go down. There is no provision for Oregon’s minimum wage to ever go down. We don’t get that.”

November 9, 2009: “Oregon law makes no provision for the minimum wage to decline when the cost of living declines, while Colorado’s constitution requires that the minimum wage there do just that. … Still, knowing the minimum wage can be cut that way lends a sense of fairness to the minimum wage that the Oregon system lacks.”

September 23, 2010: “In Oregon, the bottom line is that while the guy who works at a fast-food restaurant can expect a raise next year, the guy who runs the place probably is making less and being taxed more for the privilege.”

For Erik Lukens, the person who will shape the Oregonian’s editorial positions, Oregon’s real economic problem is that we can’t cut the wages of people who make $8.55 an hour.

By Alina Harway
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The New Face of the Oregonian, Part 1: Drill, Baby, Drill!

Last month, the Oregonian announced that they had hired the Bend Bulletin’s Erik Lukens to be the paper’s new Editorial Page Editor. At the time, we wrote that it signaled a further shift to the right for the state’s “paper of record.”

By Scott Moore
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Campaign Spending: Out of sight, out of mind?

Oregon Corporations use loophole to hide political spending

In Oregon, we have no limits on the amount of money that can be given to or spent by political campaigns. What we do have, however, are rules that require those contributions and expenditures to be reported in a transparent, timely manner.

When it comes to monitoring campaign spending, Oregon’s approach is to use the disinfecting power of sunlight. The Secretary of State maintains a publicly available web database (ORESTAR), which tracks all giving and spending so that anyone—in theory—can find out who’s putting money into political campaigns.

But as we’ve seen from people like Bill Sizemore and Kevin Mannix, exploiting the system in order avoid campaign disclosure has become almost a cottage industry. Mannix, Sizemore, and their donors have long set up complicated webs of shell organizations in order to hide their political funds.

It appears that other new political players are now taking a page from those antics.

By Scott Moore
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The Oregonian discovers ALEC

Three months after a nationwide protest against ALEC, the Oregonian finally featured an article over the weekend about the corporate lobbying group’s impact on Oregon.

If you’ve been following our coverage of ALEC over the past several months, there won’t be much in the way of new information in the Oregonian’s story. The only real new bit is the list of 22 Republican legislators (copied below) that was finally divulged by State Senator Gene Whisnant (R-Sunriver). Whisnant is the Oregon ALEC chairman and was named an ALEC Legislator of the Year in 2011.

Obviously, it’s great to see the Oregonian give prominent space to illuminating the efforts of the largest corporations in the country to write the laws that impact the lives of people in this state.

Specifically, the article did a good job of debunking the myth that ALEC is just like other groups—like, say, the National Conference of State Legislators. The truth came from, of all people, Republican State Senator Bruce Starr (R-Hillsboro):

In ALEC, private individuals and elected lawmakers have equal voice on model legislation. NCSL does not do that, Starr says. "There's not an opportunity for anybody but legislators and legislative staff to sit at the table and discuss what those policies look like. And the only ones that have the vote are legislators."

In other words, ALEC gives lobbyists from large corporations unparalleled access to write and push bills that directly benefit their bottom line at the expense of middle-class families.

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