The Worst Thing to Happen to the Seattle Channel

• CR Douglas talks to Mr. Earth Day

CR Douglas is leaving.

The station’s standout political programming host and producer emailed colleagues this morning with the bombshell that his tenure at the Seattle Channel, a city-run television station, will end on June 17. “My first appearance on the Seattle Channel was 1997 (wow, what hair I had then!), and I’ve been more or less full time since 2002,” Douglas writes. “But even amazing runs have to come to an end at some point.”

Douglas has been nominated for a total of 15 regional Emmy awards and has won two, both last year. This year he’s up for three more and the station is nominated for overall station excellence (the sort of badge only worn before by local network affiliates, not municipal television). We’ve repeatedly cheered Douglas’s hardball style, making typically banal government television relevant. Most recently, City Attorney Pete Holmes agreed to talk about his pro-tunnel lawsuit on Douglas’s political talk show, City Inside/Out, but then Holmes backed out. Several years ago, Seattle City Light Superintendent refused to appear during a controversy over rate hikes.

“I am going to take some time off,” says Douglas, reached by phone. “And that is not code. No one pushed me out. They have wanted me to stay, for me, it’s just time to go.”

Douglas has no specific plans—no job lined up—and writes that it’s simply time to “repot the plant and try something new.”

Douglas isn’t the only one re-potting the plant. Beth Hester, the Seattle Channel general manager who worked closely with Douglas (they both started full time in 2002), left the Seattle Channel to become the lead spokesperson in the mayor’s office. She starts today. “Beth and I were a real team,” Douglas says. “It was a great partnership. It is the end of an era in that way.”