WW Editor Mark Zusman Responds on OPB to Salem Statesman Journal's "Puzzling" Kitzhaber Coverage

Statesman Journal editor declines to appear on OPB's Think Out Loud to defend coverage.

In its Sunday, Oct. 11 edition, the Salem Statesman Journal made a case for former Gov. John Kitzhaber.

The paper attacked previous coverage by WW and The Oregonian, saying the Portland papers had unfairly chased the four-term governor from office. Kitzhaber resigned in February in the wake of an influence-peddling scandal involving him and first lady Cylvia Hayes.

The Statesman's Oct. 11 stories claim that Kitzhaber was drummed out of office by misleading reporting. The stories take particular aim at the claims of Oregon Department of Administrative Services manager Michael Rodgers, who refused a request to remove Kitzhaber's emails from state servers and instead leaked them to WW.

The Statesman argued those emails were never in danger of deletion, and Rodgers had no reason to believe that Kitzhaber was trying to delete them.

The Statesman's Oct. 11 package relied heavily on Janet Hoffman, the criminal defense lawyer currently representing Kitzhaber in a federal investigation. Kitzhaber also provided the paper with a statement.

In an editorial that set the tone for the Statesman's package, editor Michael Davis claimed that contrary to WW's reporting, Kitzhaber never sought to "destroy" 6,000 emails that his assistant, Jan Murdock, asked be removed from state servers but instead merely wanted to "review" those emails.

Davis' assertion is contrary to emails that WW and other publications have printed that show Department of Administrative Services staff were very uncomfortable with Murdock's request.

Oregon State Police investigators later reinterviewed those DAS staffers, and they reiterated their discomfort with one of them characterized as a "bizarre" and "unethical" request from Kitzhaber's longtime personal assistant.

Today, WW editor and publisher Mark Zusman responded to the Statesman Journal in an interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting, calling the Oct. 11 stories "puzzling." The interview airs today at noon, and again at 8 pm.

The Statesman Journal, Zusman told OPB, is "arguably a pawn in this game."

"The larger concern, if you are Gov. Kitzhaber and his lawyer, is not a story that may or may not be written about you in Willamette Week or the Salem Statesman Journal," Zusman said. "It's that, as you and I know, tampering with evidence is a crime. And obviously they are concerned with the perception that an attempt to delete or destroy emails from the state archive might be just that."

Davis, the Statesman Journal editor, declined to go on OPB today to defend his paper's reporting.

You can listen to the OPB interview with Zusman here:

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