Beat Check with The Oregonian

A weekly look inside Oregon's biggest news stories with the journalists at The Oregonian/OregonLive.com.

News
News Commentary
Politics
276
Editor Therese Bottomly on covering the coronav...
Therese Bottomly, The Oregonian/OregonLive's editor, talks about covering the coronavirus pandemic, the state of the local news industry and her career at the paper. Bottomly, a Portland native, first started working at the paper in 1983.If you...
31 min
277
Coping through social distancing
What are you doing to cope with extensive social distancing and the coronavirus pandemic? Grant Butler, an editor and reporter with The Oregonian/OregonLive, talks about what people and grocery stores are doing in response to the state crackdown. Some ...
18 min
278
Coronavirus: The educational, social and econom...
Oregon's economy took a savage hit one week into the potentially months-long reality where bars, restaurants and other social hot spots are shuttered in an attempt to combat the coronavirus. Plus, schools are shuttered through April. Eder Campuzan...
34 min
279
Can Portland's restaurant scene weather the cor...
The Oregonian/OregonLive's Michael Russell talks about the exceptional week that led more than 130 Portland restaurant and bar owners to demand Gov. Kate Brown take action to shut them down amid the coronavirus crisis, why some restaurants may nev...
18 min
280
Inside Italy's coronavirus lockdown; Oregon Leg...
Melissa Graboyes and Alfredo Burlando are professors at the University of Oregon, but the married couple and their two kids on now on lockdown in Italy. We talked about what life is like in the quarantine, why Oregonians need to let go of social plans ...
39 min
281
Covering the coronavirus and the unknown
Journalism is the search for truth, but what does a reporter do when a fast-breaking news story is filled with so many unknowns? As the coronovirus situation unfolds in the Portland area and around Oregon, The Oregonian's Fedor Zarkhin is working ...
30 min
282
The coronavirus response in Oregon
It’s been less than a week since Oregonians first learned that the state had a prospective case of the novel coronavirus. We checked in with Dr. Carlos Crespo, a community health professor and vice-provost at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health to get...
25 min
283
Concordia University's catastrophic deal with o...
Concordia University's path to financial ruin may have been sealed a decade ago. The private Lutheran university, which called Northeast Portland home for more than a century, hitched its fate to an educational technology company known as HotChalk...
28 min
284
The fight for the Boy Scouts' secret abuse files
The Boy Scouts of America have declared bankruptcy, an unprecedented move that reverberated around the nation. The wave of sex abuse lawsuits against the nonprofit organization started in Portland a decade ago. A nearly $20 million ruling against the s...
27 min
285
A Portland psychiatric hospital's struggles
The Unity Center for Behavioral Health in Northeast Portland was supposed to be a game changer for mental illness in the city. Three years after it opened, the hospital is struggling. The Oregonian/OregonLive's Molly Harbarger and Brad Schmidt tal...
29 min
286
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn: A national ...
So many of Nicholas Kristof's friends, neighbors and classmates died young. The New York Times columnist and his wife, fellow Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn tried to figure out what these tragic deaths of despair from so many Yamh...
43 min
287
Will Republicans walk out of Salem again?
Oregon's Legislature meets for the next 35 days in Salem, and a cap and trade bill is expected to be the centerpiece of the session. This comes less than a year after Senate Republicans walked out and left the state to prevent Democrats from movin...
32 min
288
How Catlin Gabel school abuse scandal came to l...
Catlin Gabel is facing a reckoning. The Southwest Portland private school, known as a progressive educational institution that's educated the city's wealthy and elite for decades, released an explosive investigation in December that outlined ...
30 min
289
What to expect in Jeremy Christian's murder trial
One of the darkest days in Portland's recent history will be back in the spotlight for the next five weeks. Jeremy Christian is on trial for fatally stabbing Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche and seriously wounding Micah Fletcher on a MAX train...
43 min
290
Another leadership shuffle at Portland Police B...
Danielle Outlaw arrived in Portland as police chief in 2017 to much acclaim. She talked about changing the bureau, repairing the relationship with the public and much more. She quietly left Portland to become Philadelphia's chief just before New Y...
38 min
291
Meet the daredevil driver of an Oregon speed ra...
Life comes at you fast. For Valerie Thompson, the driver of the Aurora-based Target 550 racing team, fast is never fast enough. Thompson is one of the fastest drivers in the world and one of a handful of women who get behind the wheel of the fastest in...
23 min
292
Oregon's biggest stories of 2019: Gordon Sondla...
A look back at the biggest stories in Oregon this year. The Oregonian/OregonLive's Everton Bailey and Kale Williams join Beat Check to talk about the memorable stories from 2019 and their broader meaning. The conversation touched on the Republican...
34 min
293
What's the best Portland brewery right now?
The Oregonian's Andre Meunier approached 2019 with a seemingly impossible task: to visit 49 breweries based in Portland (he squeezed in one more after recording) and designate the best shop in town this year. Meunier talked about his top 10 list, ...
38 min
294
Will Oregon's economic good times continue to r...
A conversation with Mike Rogoway about some of the biggest business stories of the past year. We talked about Intel and Nike's internal strife but continued profitability, Gert Boyle's death, massive layoffs at a food processing plant in the ...
33 min
295
Vision Zero and Portland's surge in traffic fat...
Portland has seen a dramatic increase in traffic fatalities this year. The death toll this year is pushing toward 50, well above the average for the past two decades. On the latest episode of Beat Check with The Oregonian, Officer Phillip Maynard discu...
35 min
296
The man behind Darcelle XV, Portland's iconic d...
Walter Cole is perhaps the most prominent living Portlander, but many people likely don’t know him by that name. Instead, they know him by his stage name, Darcelle XV. The Oregonian's Beth Nakamura and Brooke Herbert talked about Cole's life ...
28 min
297
Brad Schmidt on his investigation into radon in...
The Oregonian's Brad Schmidt spent the past year investigating how federal regulators and local housing authorities have failed to test for radon, an odorless gas that is the second-leading cause of lung cancer nationwide, in low-income housing co...
38 min
298
Gordon Sondland goes to Washington
The Oregonian's Jeff Manning reflects on a remarkable day in Washington, D.C., where Gordon Sondland, the Pacific Northwest hotelier and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Impeachment Panel for hours. There were some...
10 min
299
Ted Sickinger on Oregon's failing forests
Get an inside look at how The Oregonian's investigative reporter, Ted Sickinger, approached his series on the state forestry's financial woes, the $1 billion lawsuit facing the agency and why Oregon is owed more than $100 million in past wild...
36 min
300
Jeff Manning on Gordon Sondland
Gordon Sondland is a well-known commodity in Portland business and civic circles, but now the Republican hotelier is an internationally-known character and one of the key players at the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Jeff Manni...
24 min