Much of local media in Oregon and Washington changed their protocols and priorities after Donald J. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Unknowingly, Emma was sucked into this vortex. Below is her tale of living and working in a suburb of Blue Portland, in Blue Oregon. She now feels free to tell her tale because she has changed employers.
MY FIRST JOB AS A JOURNALIST
When I graduated from Portland State University with a degree in journalism in 2019, I was thrilled to obtain a job with a large media organization which owned over 20 small newspapers. I was assigned to be a reporter for two suburban papers in the Portland Metro Area. My beat was widespread, from crime to politics to human interest stories to local community events.
I had been there about a month when my editor came to me and told me that I would be on the “racism” beat. I wasn’t sure what that was so I asked. He told me that headquarters wanted stories about racist incidents, even minor ones. Even if we had to stretch the facts, if a white resident and a non-white resident had any kind of dispute, I was to slant the article to make it sound like the white person was racist. According to my editor, the governor had just signed a “Bias Hotline” bill and HQs wanted to assist the state in compiling data of racist incidents. I did not feel comfortable with this but I agreed to keep an eye out for such stories.
Several months later a coworker, who checked the police blog each day, told me about a woman who called police because of a “fuck you” painted on a sign in the parking lot of her condo building. I thought this was a stupid story since the building had over 100 tenants and no one knew which tenant was targeted. Indeed, was anyone targeted? Maybe the unknown graffiti writer had a dispute with the building management. The woman who called police insisted she was the target because she was “black,” although she had no idea who had painted it. So, I wrote up the story as a racist incident in this upscale suburb of Portland to push the narrative headquarters wanted.
WE FELL FOR A RACIST HOAX
When someone claimed to be a victim of racism, I was only allowed to report the “victim’s” claims, ignoring witnesses and evidence. Indeed, I was not allowed to talk to witnesses or the person who had allegedly committed the “racist” incident, even when I had their names and contact information because they might debunk the notion that the incident was caused by racist hatred.
In December, 2022 I rushed to report a homeowner’s claim that a racist slur had been painted on the front of her house. I did not talk to the neighbors who saw the “victim” paint the slurs on her own house.^ THAT would have spoiled the narrative headquarters wanted to promote. Just days after we published the “victim’s” story as fact, police reported that the homeowner had written the slur on her own house. She was arrested for filing a false police report. We had no choice but to publish a follow up story about this hoax. This was very embarrassing for me.
THIS STORY STILL HAUNTS ME
While the BLM/Antifa riots were raging in Portland during the summer of 2020, wanna be thugs, teens in these two communities, periodically drove around screaming out their car windows such things as “die, whitey, die” and “white supremacist” and “boomers die” at white pedestrians. Sometimes they would throw rocks or other hard objects at passersby. This went on throughout the summer in both suburbs, but I was not allowed to write about it.
One night one of the cars containing two hispanics & two whites was driving around throwing hard objects at white pedestrians. The car eventually stopped and started screaming at two pedestrians. One of the pedestrians threw a little bit of water from her water bottle which hit the Hispanic driver’s arm outside the window. The car drove off and stopped up the road, where the driver called her older brother. He went to the location looking to beat up the older woman who threw water on his sister. She had already left, so her brother tried to hit a white man standing there. The driver of the car then called the police who told her he would issue a citation for criminal harassment to the woman who tossed the water.
My editor told me to talk to the driver and those in her car, but not to the woman who was cited, nor any of the witnesses who were there. Also, I was not allowed to mention that this carload of teens had circled around this group several times, throwing hard objects at them before they stopped. The driver filed a false police report about the incident and one of the “witnesses” in her car lied under oath at the preliminary hearing. Eventually, the charges were dismissed. I was not allowed to write a follow up article about this incident because it did not fit the “all whites are racists” narrative.
POLICE DESPERATELY SEEKING RACISM
By my third year on the racism beat, I discovered that one of the suburbs that I covered had a police department who was doing basically the same thing as me. Since there was so little expressions of racism in this community, the new chief of police, who was hired because he was a person of color, instructed his officers to keep an eye out for any dispute between a white resident and a non-white resident. It did not matter whether the dispute resulted in a crime. One police officer I dealt with was promoted because he wrote up a lot of “racist incident” reports. Regardless the circumstances and regardless if the non-white resident was at fault, it was written up as a “racist incident” to inflate the data for Oregon’s Bias Hotline:
Living Behind Enemy Lines, Tale #41: Bias Hotline Terrorizes White, Heterosexual Americans
At the urging of race-baiters and race grifters, in 2019 Oregon’s Democrat Legislature passed and Democrat Governor Kate Brown signed a bill on July 15, 2019, which set up a “bias” hotline for various kinds of hypersensitive, immature losers to call in or report online how traumatized they are because someone (that is, a white, heterosexual, Conservativ…
^The newspaper recently removed from their website both the original article about this “racist incident” and the article published after police had investigated and discovered it was a hoax by the homeowner who claimed to be the victim.
The author, Diane L. Gruber, is a First Amendment advocate who writes for Substack. She calls her Substack newsletter America First Re-Ignited.
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