Dispatch from Portland 2023: Unbridgeable
Alarmed by local media's reticence to report, as well as ideological divisions tearing apart his peers, a young journalist decides to leave Portland
Sorting through files of Portland reporting for a larger project, I am coming across many unpublished interviews and stories. I will be running some of them here.
First up is James, who grew up in a Portland suburb. A public-school kid, he later attended University of Oregon and hit on journalism as a career. Portland is not a media hub, and James (not his real name) spent the first few years out of school smoking weed and playing video games in his mom's basement.
"I think I was exactly the audience for Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life," he told me last spring, and that while he "didn’t love all of it," he was struck, at age 22, by the realization that it was up to him to make something of his life. He scored a job as a reporter and loved the dynamism that comes with finding, pitching and producing stories.
But by 2018, he noticed the field of what was allowable to report on narrowing. James did not want to be quoted about his experience at his previous employer. He did not have to be. Such proscription, during the Trump era, became endemic to the industry.
“In each department, there are investigators looking to root out stories they don’t deem on-message enough,” an editor who previously worked at The New York Times told me. “It becomes impossible to publish nearly anything that isn’t essentialist without being accused of racism or misogyny or transphobia. You may be Latino; your relatives may not use ‘Latinx’ or have even heard of it, but you’re a racist if you don’t support its use inside the building and editorially.”
James left his media job for another in Portland, one where the parameters were broader. It was a job he might have kept but for a different kind of intolerance, this one among his friends, a division he saw opening after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 27, 2020. This rift, he says, continues to the day and, in his mind, is unbridgeable. Which is why, at 27, he'd taken a job out of state and would be moving from Portland within the month.
James spoke to me at a Starbucks on Portland’s upscale NW 23rd Street. His interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Portland is beautiful, right? And 23rd is a nice street. Nice shops and coffee shops. No real complaints. And then the pandemic happened. That was the first shoe to fall.
This specific Starbucks was smashed a few months ago. It was completely random. It was kind of a black bloc parade coming down 23rd. I think they'd been getting feedback from the community on the east side [of Portland], that really the people you have an issue with are the rich people on the west side of town.
I was at a bar two blocks over when they went marching down the street. It might have been forty or fifty; it was a good-sized group. And they were chanting whatever the slogan of the day was. And then an hour later when I walked home, the Starbucks was all smashed.
I worked in local media in 2017. You'd have guests on, and the private conversations afterwards, it was alarming, what was declared beyond the pale, in terms of what we were allowed to talk about. The story pitches started to narrow, and it was kind of clear which ideas were not [going to fly]. That has been my frustration. I think the media and the activist class were sort of moving in the same direction. I recently spoke to a local journalism school class. And I was just so alarmed at every kid in that class. This is a master’s program in journalism, and what they told me was, "I'm getting into journalism to be an advocate for the underrepresented, a voice for the voiceless." We're not talking the traditional holding the fourth estate accountable, or holding power to account, no. It was a very specific. "These are the people I'm advocating for. These are the people whose justice needs to be restored. This is what I'm going to devote my career to." These are people who previously might have gone to work for nonprofits, but who have now realized that journalism is the best vehicle [for social change].
And they're being pushed to do that; they're being encouraged, and the professor's supporting this. He basically asked me, during the Q&A, "Are you concerned that Oregon could have a Republican governor for the first time in X number of years?" And I'm like, "First of all, no. And second of all, even if I were, that's not a position that I would feel comfortable advertising." I think everyone's kind of expecting a little bit of a correction here based on how far the city has gone, how far the state has gone. But it was definitely implied that, "Is this something you're worried about? Does this keep you up at night?" It was just kind of strange.
One of the weird things that came out of the protests was the heat on the broadcast stations. The four big local stations are owned by major corporations at this point. They decided, it's not safe to send people down [to the protests], to send camera crews down there. So what happens? They end up relying on the independent journalists who sell their footage for pennies on the dollar, compared to what a network photographer would charge. To call these people independent journalists, it became a joke. You just put PRESS on your shirt and all of a sudden you're a journalist. That's the entire model; it's just deconstructing.
And that's what's become frustrating from a journalist's perspective. The pandemic also provided this great distraction from the reality on the ground, whether it's from politicians or activists or organizations. Traffic deaths are at a historic high? “It's the pandemic.” Well, there are fewer cars on the road than there ever been, so riddle me that. Homicides at a record high? “It's the pandemic.” If you look at the data, June 2020 is when the shootings in the city of Portland started to take off. And then July it’s like, this train has left the station.
I can remember that first night the city got ransacked. [It was May 29, 2020.] The first night. people are running out with Gucci bags and everyone's just kind of, "Oh, is that how it's going to be?" The morning after, the city was just in glass, it's just glass all over the ground. Pioneer Place Mall had been ransacked and looted. My most vivid memory from that walk was how busy the roads were with cars that you see less often downtown. Entire families were piled into Ford F-150s and other rural/suburban vessels, circling the block, looking at the broken glass and graffiti on the storefronts. It was a spectacle. People who hadn't been in the city in months or whatever [because of the pandemic], now come down to take pictures like it's Santa Claus. It was the first domino to fall when people realized that vandalism would be tolerated, especially if it targeted a major corporation, Apple, Target, Starbucks, etcetera.
You look at the police officer overtime hours worked in the city of Portland in June. It goes up to 80,000 hours, across 800 officers, and you're going, "So basically what little resources there were, are being used trying to just stop the city from being on fire." And I think everyone just went, "Time to do whatever the hell you want." It's like Sauron's eye in Lord of the Rings. He's looking over here, so he doesn't know what's going on over there. You can only focus on so many things. All of this is happening and you're wondering, "Okay, we watch a clearly disturbing video [of George Floyd]. But what does a corrupt police officer in Minneapolis have to do with the Portland Police Bureau?" We know it became a referendum on policing in general. But for most people it was not a direct line, that the city of Portland should burn because this terrible thing happened in Minnesota. In the summer of 2020 it was not uncommon to see people cussing out cops who were simply walking on the street. Random people just walking up to police officers with whom they had no relationship to saying, “Fuck you, you fucking assholes!”
