In a floor speech this week, Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, welcomed the Oregon Association of Broadcasters to the state capitol — and threw in a good-ole-days-of-journalism lecture for good measure.

“I do not believe we are getting the good information about the work we are doing here out to the state of Oregon presently because of what the economic factors are in having a broadcast station, television station, radio stations around the state,” Frederick said during remonstrances on the Senate Floor on Tuesday.

Frederick, a former journalist, said:

“When I was a reporter we spent a lot of time here at the Capitol in the bureaus for the commercial television stations in Portland. There were four commercial television stations. All four had bureaus. None of them have bureaus now…we no longer have the day to day understanding of the kind of work that’s done, the people involved, the issues involved, the process involved. That needs to change.”

No mention of print reporters, though.

Although that breed is also less abundant than it once was in the Capitol — old hands like to tell of days when there were seven or eight reporters from the Oregonian roaming the “marble zoo” every day — they can be found with more regularity than their counterparts in broadcasting.