Expect Bias in The Oregonian's Education Coverage, Here is Why
The Oregonian, along with its parent company, Oregonian Media Group, is a for-profit enterprise owned by one of the richest men in the world, a billionaire magnate, Donald Newhouse, whose net worth is estimated to be $13.1 billion, and who controls the private, family-held business, Advance Publications, which he inherited from his father, Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr. Among other brands, Advance Publications also owns Condé Nast, which includes the magazines Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Bon Appétit, Glamour, Teen Vogue, and Architectural Digest. Advance is also among the largest shareholders in Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Reddit. As the media research organization, Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press argues, concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few ultra wealthy owners is a threat to democracy. They write: "It is not the wealth they gain that is the most damaging to democracy. . . But the control of the information by the few is serious. They determine what is news, how it is covered, and what to exclude. They portray themselves as objective. . . When journalists and people not employed by these conglomerates try to expose injustices or cover news excluded by mass media, it becomes more evident that the 'right' to a free press does not belong to all of us. . . Media conglomerates have supported wars, foreign interventions, militarism, and given distorted coverage of people’s movements against injustices."
- Advance Publications and the company's owner, Donald Newhouse, whose Oregonian Media Group publishes The Oregonian, have a documented anti-union track record. Such a bent has manifested itself on a local level, and is poised to continue to taint The Oregonian's education coverage, with the possible effect of pitting the public against school teachers.
The Oregonian has a long history of being a conservative publication. As the Oregon Historical Society's Oral History Project states, The Oregonian has been a conservative publication since its early days. Just a decade after its inception in 1850, "the paper was acquired by its printer, Henry Pittock, who transformed it into a daily. As Pittock shifted his interests to banking and real estate speculation, editor Harvey Scott made it a conservative Republican paper," which has throughout its history, supported mostly Republican candidates for the US presidential elections. As the Oregon Encyclopedia explains, "in its partisan news columns and editorials, the daily was a conservative Republican paper allied to Portland’s leading business and commercial interests and, into the 1950s, to Oregon Republican Party factions. The paper long stood for the established order, state and city growth, private and public regional investment, and efforts to establish and maintain Portland’s supremacy over regional rivals." The media research organization, Media Buzz, found that even though the publication is currently "mostly neutral as far as its news coverage is concerned," The Oregonian's "right-center bias does seep into its editorials and even news." Infamously, The Oregonian has in the past even vowed to not cover climate change against the will of its readers. There have been some outright questionable pieces published in The Oregonian undermining the paper's credibility, such as the op-ed defending far-right group Patriot Prayer and lauding its founder Joey Gibson as a promoter of peace, as well as a piece suggesting Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty was a suspect--since cleared of any wrongdoing--in a hit-and-run based on allegations published only on reactionary right-wing blogs.
Readers of The Oregonian have already endured years of biased commentary and coverage of education, which has even been criticized by local journalism students for sensationalizing sensitive topics and for selective bias.
A key objective of The Oregonian's parent company, Oregonian Media Group (OMG), is to maximize its profits, or in the company's own words, to "(drive) value for our advertisers as a media company." Said another way, the focus is on amassing wealth for the owner through advertising and content that sells. OMG's website states that its mission is to "(build) a sustainable model for journalism by delighting our readers and driving value for our advertisers." The media company's value statement distinctly prioritizes business interests, stating that OMG focuses on "helping local businesses – so essential to our economy and daily lives – to regain their footing and create economic opportunity." The value statement concludes, revealing the publication's priorities: "The values we set forward are constant reminders of who’s most important to our business as we look to help those in our community thrive and grow." In a particularly dramatic chapter of The Oregonian's existence, from 1959 to 1964, the publication's workers organized the third longest newspaper strike in the United States, which lasted sixty-five months. During this strike, according to Oregon Encyclopedia, "dynamite set in six newspaper delivery trucks in Oregon City and four in northwest Portland exploded. Fights erupted on picket lines, and Oregonian production manager Don Newhouse (Samuel's cousin)" was wounded in a shooting, with the assault blamed on the unions, but not substantiated as such. Donald's father, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr., who bought The Oregonian in 1950 and its main competitor, the Oregon Journal during the strike, banned unions from the workplace. The Oregonian's more recent history is rife with unfair labor practices such as mass layoffs and firings of veteran reporters in lieu of less experienced and less expensive employees. Even Last Week Tonight's Show with John Oliver spotlighted The Oregonian for its sizable layoffs in 2013 when the publication went digital and a quota system tied to employee compensation was put into place.
Besides being staunchly anti-worker, The Oregonian has a legacy of stirring up and upholding the racist practices and foundations of the state of Oregon. As reporter Rob Davis demonstrates in his examination of the paper's racist past, "The Oregonian’s Racist Legacy," part of the Publishing Prejudice Project, the publication has "spent decades reinforcing the racial divide in a state founded as whites-only, fomenting the racism that people of color faced." On his Twitter account Davis summed up The Oregonian's role in history in this way: "The Oregonian excused lynching, promoted segregation and opposed equal rights. It celebrated excluding Asian immigrants and said exterminating tribes might be needed." Furthermore, the publication has catered to Portland's white elites. Davis wrote: "The Oregonian, which labeled itself the 'official paper of the state,' spoke to white, affluent Portland, including industries like real estate and banking, which spent decades working to exclude people of color from the city." Arguably this is still the case, though Therese Bottomly, the editor of the paper, has apologized for Oregonian's racist legacy and has vowed to hold "listening sessions beginning in early 2023 to hear directly from communities of color about how we can improve our coverage," "launch an internal audit of our sources to see whether we are talking to a diverse cross-section of the communities we cover," and bring on "a senior newsroom leader to guide our diversity and inclusion work."
- Meanwhile, The Oregonian's Editorial Board endorsed the Portland elite-backed Rene Gonzalez for Portland City Council, helping him win the seat this month. Gonzalez founded ED300, an anti-union, anti-teacher parent group and political action committee that has endorsed school board candidates with anti-LGBTQ views who oppose the Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education curriculum in Oregon schools. In their campaigns, these candidates with ties to far-right wing organizations, including Oregonians for Liberty in Education, Oregon Right to Life, and the anti-gay Oregon Family Council, stood against schools incorporating social justice themes and teaching the truth about racism in U.S. history, often explicitly, other times shrouding their dog whistles behind phrases such as curriculum transparency, parents' rights, "back to basics," or the focus on the three Rs--reading, writing, and arithmetics. ED300 has also been involved in a medical misinformation campaign in order to do away with COVID-19 mitigation in schools. Gonzalez's idea of reinstating the municipal court in Portland to deal with petty crime, which he floated during his campaign, is blatantly racist and classist because, as countless experts around the country have shown, entanglements with the municipal court adversely impact some of the most impoverished and traditionally racially profiled populations.
While The Oregonian recognizes that its "newsroom is not as racially and ethnically diverse as the community it serves," and claims it is committed to change, the goal seems a distant one as the paper's Life and Culture reporters appear to all be white, and its newsroom leaders are currently still all middle-aged white women, a narrow demographic that sets the tone and makes content decisions through its particular limited lens. For The Oregonian's in-depth examination of the publication's racist past, the paper "asked two former diversity committee chairs, people of color who are no longer at the paper, to review the drafts and provide advice," and "contracted with five BIPOC community members who reviewed the drafts to provide more feedback." While this "unprecedented" vetting process is commendable, a real redress would mean being willing to hire BIPOC journalists and newsroom directors who publish work that uplifts critical, underrepresented voices with integrity, instead of perpetuating or appeasing the wealthy, predominantly white status quo. Currently, the newspaper only employs two Black reporters out of the total of 64 staff listed on its website, and they are both stereotypically part of the Sports coverage team.
This fall, The Oregonian had the opportunity to do its best to hire a reporter--ideally of color--to ensure balanced public education coverage. Such a journalist should be one willing to include perspectives from the ground that may diverge from, even critique, the current power structure of our city, school district and beyond. Instead, the company chose another middle-aged white woman, Julia Silverman, a darling of ED300, a vocal, predominantly white, privileged parent group and political action committee that spreads anti-teacher and anti-union views as well as medical misinformation, minimizing the dangers of COVID on social media and in ultra conservative publications such as The Manhattan Institute's City Journal, in what looks to be part of an anti-mitigation campaign with ties to organizations funded by wealthy radical right donors.* 
Silverman and her ED300 fans base much of their urgency and criticism of the state of k-12 education on the concept of learning loss*, a phenomenon that should of course be expected during a deadly and debilitating pandemic, but which has--since 2020 as reported by The Lever, among others--been used to justify an increased focus on racist standardized testing as well as teacher- and union-bashing. As if the pandemic itself weren't enough to deal with, the combination of the hostility against teachers and regressive top-down district policies has caused stress and push-out of educators from public schools, and the profession as a whole. Learning loss has been used as a justification for exorbitant expenditures on oppressive corporate curricula and outsourced, unvetted tax payer-funded private contracts. All of these ideas and "remedies" are being pushed and accelerated by groups such as ED300 and their media mouth pieces, including Julia Silverman, very possibly in concert with or as part of covertly funded efforts* by prominent foundations and right-wing billionaires with an interest in selling out and privatizing public schools as well as "gigifying" and digitizing the teaching profession while dismantling teacher unions.
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