Earlier today, Art Pedroza at OrangeJuiceBlog reported that Steven Greenhut, the longtime senior editorial writer and columnist at The Orange County Register, has accepted a job in Sacramento. Though he didn't have the details, Pedroza was right. Greenhut told me tonight that he is opening a news bureau and investigative journalism program in the state capital for the Pacific Research Institute, the free-market, individual liberty organization that is based in San Francisco.
“My column will still run fairly regularly in the Register, but with a Sacto focus,” said Greenhut. “I'm leaving on great terms. It's just time for a new challenge and state government desperately needs some additional attention.”
During his career as a regular columnist at the Reg, Greenhut–a solid libertarian voice–has angered police, liberals, Democrats, bureaucrats, union leaders and Republicans with stances that at the core deride increasing government power and, in his view, the shameless looting of public treasuries by special interest groups.
Did I say police officers, who now get to retire at the spry age of 50 and collect their salaries for the rest of their lives, despise him for strenuously opposing the massive cost to taxpayers?
He also once famously pissed off Bill O'Reilly of Fox News by challenging the necessity of George W. Bush's Iraq War.
Last year, he mocked Republican obsession with blocking gay marriage.
Greenhut said he will launch his project on October 5.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.