A gunman kills 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and journalists in Portland, Ore., turn against a newspaper columnist who dared to write something laudatory about an activist who supports Donald Trump.
This progressive corner of America is becoming so irrational that the press – the one institution with constitutional protection to ask questions – now moves in goosestep.
On Sunday, The Oregonian newspaper ran an opinion column by Elizabeth Hovde headlined “The Misunderstood Joey Gibson.”
The Portland media, especially those that market themselves as alternative, routinely refer to Gibson as a right-wing extremist, a fascist, even a Nazi.
If Gibson espoused anti-Trump rhetoric, he might likely be deemed a “community organizer.”
His group, Patriot Prayer, has done street combat – literally – with anti-Trump protesters who call themselves antifas or “anti-fascists.” When Gibson’s group has obtained permits for lawful gatherings in Portland, antifas – many with masks covering their faces – have taken to the streets to run them off. The two sides yell at one another, throw things at each other and pepper spray one another.
Sometimes Portland police officers intervene; sometimes they don’t.
Occasionally, Patriot Prayer and antifas will have impromptu encounters as they did recently outside a Portland bar. It turned into a giant brawl.
Last week, Gibson’s group held a rally on the campus of Washington State University in Vancouver, just across the Columbia River from Portland. Antifas stayed away, and there was no violence. Hovde attended this peaceful rally and talked to some of the students. She wrote about it in her column:
“For two hours, I watched challenging, inquisitive, respectful conversations happening on the campus plaza between people of different political persuasions. Instead of the violence predicted, Gibson brought something we need more of: talk that leads to increased understanding about opposing thoughts and the people behind them. It was the kind of conversation that helps people find common ground …” Hovde wrote. “There was zero violence at the rally, as no groups showed up to offer it.”
That might explain why there was little media coverage of this particular Patriot Prayer rally compared to some of the others.
Media interest hit after Hovde’s column appeared.
What she saw and heard did not match what others want to believe. They reacted angrily on The Oregonian’s comment forum and had their say.
There were calls for Hovde to be fired. Some readers tried to draw a connection between Gibson’s politics and the shooter in the synagogue killings. They branded Gibson a “white nationalist” because some of his supporters have defended the white race. A group called Portland’s Resistance started a boycott against businesses that advertise in The Oregonian.
None of that is unusual as editorial controversies go. What made this different was the number of journalists who piled on against Hovde.
“Pretty surreal to see the publication you work for (unwittingly??) gaslight its readers in the Sunday paper,” Oregonian reporter Shane Dixon Kavanaugh posted on Twitter.
Samantha Swindler, who works at The Oregonian, chimed in: “I used to have a column in the paper and, um, for the record, I would never have written a profile on Joey Gibson.”
“Me, too,” tweeted Anna Griffin, a former Oregonian columnist who is now news director of Oregon Public Broadcasting, a position that would seem to require she keep an inquiring mind.
Griffin’s mind closed on Gibson about two years ago when she denounced his appearance on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.” It was as if she didn’t think he should have ever been invited on the show. Meanwhile, Gregory McKelvey, co-founder of Portland’s Resistance, which called for an advertiser boycott over Hovde’s column, has been a guest on OPB many times.
OPB staffer Samantha Matsumoto didn’t like Hovde’s column either, and Katie Shepherd, a reporter at Willamette Week, called it a “slap in the face” to all journalists who have covered Gibson “and dealt with the consequences.”
Perhaps Shepherd now knows how 74-year-old Kent Houser felt when he was trying to drive in downtown Portland about a month ago, and a mob surrounded his car and bashed his windows. Shepherd might want to reread the piece she wrote dismissing it as “the relatively quiet demonstrations in downtown Portland.”
Could it be that she didn’t have a problem with that level of violence because it was in service to Black Lives Matter? The protesters were upset that Portland police shot and killed an armed black gunman who had wounded two other black men. Houser had nothing to do with the shooting, but he was a white guy so there was that.
Also joining the pile-on was Shepherd’s boss, Aaron Mesh, managing editor of Willamette Week. He weighed in with the observation that he didn’t like op-eds, which is amusing coming from him. Half the stories in his paper read like op-eds. That’s fine. I still read many of them (and question most of them).
These journalists apparently don’t appreciate how much credibility the media have lost. People increasingly trust their own lived experience, or that of their friends and family, more than what they see or hear from professional journalists.
Note that phrase I used – “lived experience.” You see it and hear it a lot now, but usually the media apply it to criminal offenders, drug addicts, prison inmates, the homeless.
Journalists forget that we all have lived experience. Too often the stories being pushed by the media fit the stereotypes that journalists are comfortable with – not the reality as lived by many readers and viewers.
Personally, my lived experience taught me that the antifas are more aggressive than Gibson. Last year as I stood on a public sidewalk in downtown Portland observing an anti-Trump protest, I was approached by a young woman and warned, “For your own safety, you need to leave.”
She and her friends did not like the questions I had been asking at a neighboring protest run by Gibson the next block over. They apparently decided I was too sympathetic to their enemies.
I told her it was a public sidewalk, and I was staying. She walked away and joined a man and two other women. This trio had scarves over their faces.
Several minutes later, I felt something behind me and turned around to see the woman, now with the masked trio, their arms linked trying to shove me. Even with police all over downtown, this group felt confident enough to gang up on me.
What the journalists attacking Hovde don’t appreciate is that Gibson often looks like the underdog. He is opposed by: the antifas, Portland’s Resistance, Don’t Shoot Portland, Black Lives Matter and all the unaffiliated anti-cop, anti-Trump, anti-capitalist, anti-ICE groupies who pop up the minute there’s any kind of protest at City Hall or in the streets of Portland. Gibson isn’t even at most of these events.
It was a ridiculous stretch to try and draw a connection between the shooter in Pittsburgh and Gibson’s politics. The reality is that some of the very same faces who object to Gibson have also sat in City Council chambers at City Hall and protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. They have demanded that the city of Portland divest from any corporations whose products have been used to displace Palestinians. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be considered anti-Semitic.
Hovde has an advantage over the journalists who were so quick to judge her. For much of her professional life, she has been surrounded by coworkers who don’t share her politics. She can’t settle into complacency. She knows she will be challenged.
Years ago I worked with Hovde at The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Wash. I was city desk editor while she was an editorial writer. I would talk to her occasionally. We didn’t agree on many social issues, but she seemed genuinely interested in what other people thought.
The best description of what is happening in the American media today was in The New York Times recently in one of the stories about the Pittsburgh shootings. Unfortunately, it wasn’t by one of the Times esteemed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists. It was by a commenter using the name Aristotle Gluteus Maximus, who pointed out there were mass shootings before Trump took office.
“What has remained constant with these mass murders during different presidential administrations?” he asked. “Media agitation, but they won’t admit it… .”
Yes, the media like to agitate. When one of their own refuses to go along, they pounce.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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I”m not a Hovde fan and even I can see there’s nothing wrong in what she wrote. Her big sin was not conforming to Portland groupThink.
I didn’t go to Joey’s rally because I had to work. I can’t say if the rally was as peaceful as Hovde said. If it was, then she wasn’t incorrect in what she wrote. If there’d been fighting I’m sure the other media would’ve said so. Excuse to agitate.
I notice most of these so called journalists complaining about her are women. Kinda interesting.
I’d like to see these so called journalists put on a MAGA hat and a Trump T-shirt and walk around downtown Portland. You’d find out what it’s like to be Joey. Hope you like getting spit on.
If the two male journalists who complained about Hovde tried that little experiment in downtown Portland, it could get physical. The ladies might get off with only hard glares and verbal intimidation.
Of course, during the last presidential race, somebody driving around with a Hillary bumper sticker in some parts of Eastern Oregon might have been run off the road.
Personally, I have found that folks who lean towards the political right enjoy arguing while those on the left want to shut down dissent — while calling for more conversation.
I sent a tweet to Swindler at The Oregonian, and she responded that she wasn’t asking for censorship; she thought Hovde’s column should have been “edited” to add “context.”
Context is a slippery word. What precisely does it mean in this, uh, context? Why should a columnist, who is writing an opinion piece, be required to add “context” when the mainstream media routinely get away with statements in news stories, such as “A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man…” without mentioning that the unarmed black man was reaching for the officer’s gun. How many thousands of times has Michael Brown’s shooting (and others) been summed up with no context.
In case you didn’t hear it, and you may not have since the mainstream media didn’t agitate it, a black man was arrested this past week for vandalizing a New York synagogue with anti-Semitic slurs. The man had worked in President Obama’s campaign. I’m not sure what context would make that man’s actions acceptable. Perhaps a reference to slavery.
The real ACLU, a few years ago before it lost its soul to George Soros’ thirty pieces of silver, would show its true allegiance to the First Amendment – the true temple of American democracy – not by defending their friends, but by defending the speech of those they despised.
Those days are gone, and now only acceptable speech is worth defending. In fact the very ministers of the temples of free speech are rushing in to prove their po,itical correctness..
On NPR a story explained how loons like some of these – Chloe Eudaly – find their support vanish in places like Australia where not voting can be fined, the result being the politically correct extremes lose the death grip on not just power, but even political speech. Hovde is a witch, who in the eyes of so-called journalists – should either burn or prove her virtue by sinking to the bottom of the river while strapped to a chair.
The Rushdie business was my first notice of what was to become a tidal wave of printed hypocrisy and cowardice.
le Carre aka Cornwell and a few other writers of stature felt that Rushdie deserved what he got. I didn’t suspect the rout of the intellectual West that was to come. A rout that eventually became the happy collusion and then a lock step march with darkness.
Parenthetically, I’m listening to Robert Ryan’s opening lines in The Iceman Cometh. “To hell with the truth . . . ”
I was late coming to NPR, too. I recall being thrilled by the format and talk. But, I also recall deciding to work with the reportorial half truths and omissions as they popped up. I recall one time I heard a reporter who’d gone among the “homeless” and pointedly remarked that some were responsible for their own troubles. It stopped me cold. It was a unique experience.
I have small faith in NPR reportage.
I also tried reading Griffen’s sports stuff when she wrote for the Oregonian. The misandry popped off of the page. I couldn’t figure why they tossed this chick the keys to the rig, so to speak.
The press has made nationalism a synonym for White Racism when I have always understood it to be closer kin to patriotism. I nearly cried when first I read Man Without a Country and loved watching Fiedler rouse out Stars and Stripes Forever. Like or dislike my patriotism, it intended a loyalty to Americans.
You know the saying, “Saying my country right or wrong is like saying my mother drunk or sober”?
Hovde has always been a tepid soul to my thinking and her gumming a story up for print has never held my interest. However, I am glad to read of her fair treatment of Gibson. He tries to do the right thing. Someone had to stand in opposition to the BLM thugs and Antifa.
The press: Acosta does not even clear the Sam Donaldson bar of decency. I admire Sarah Sanders, not least because she looks like someone I would know (or like to) and she has a strong character.
Andrea Mitchell and April Ryan journalists? Maxine Waters and Hardesty are well informed and educated centrist politicians who want what’s best for the entire community in comparison. Eudaly aspires.
The “journalists” piling on Hovde … it is a conspicuous betrayal of trade ethics, community welfare, and personal honesty. It captures the allure of pack-running and self-righteousness. I don’t know whether Hovde’s pen shook when she wrote truth to power, mine would’ve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NAKH8jdgm8
just because
I’m not so forgiving of Gibson as Larry but can appreciate Hovde’s facile take. Gibson is a self-admitted real-life troll. This is, to be sure, significantly more admirable than an internet troll as Gibson is putting his name on the line and his skin in the game. He deserves respect for that. While he may remain peaceful; however, he has a cadre of minions who regularly agitate for violence where he is not present. To me, he is an activist who doth protest too much.
I often listen to NPR/OPB. I tire of their incessant droning on about race and gender, but in spite of that find their coverage more balanced than most of what I find available. I am admittedly a left of center white guy, but one who voted against Kitz and for Knute.
I think the real call to political action should be for centrist politicians and journalists to call on other open minded citizens to vote for the more moderate in any political contest regardless of party affiliation. Perhaps then we could regain a measure of control over the extreme interweb-powered destructive wings of our society.
I fear however that our nation will see further dissolution of any shared identity as our fourth branch takes their own knee at the alter of Mammon, and they continue to mutate the the old adage “if it bleeds it leads” into it a modern meaning.
After re-reading Larry’s post, he had little to say about Gibson. I attributed other’s ideas to him. Please retract my initial statement, Larry, accept my apology.
Oh, I didn’t feel too roughly handled and thank you for your concern.
I’ll never understand why masked children and thugs are treated with deference while they attack community. That is the origin of my interest and sympathy for Gibson.
Thanks Larry and Matt for the comments.
The Fourth Estate is part of the problem. They don’t report on all sides with equal vigor. They helped create Joey Gibson by giving the antifas generous publicity to state their case and protest. One of the reasons I went to the June 4 protests last year was to see for myself what these various groups were saying.
My impression of Gibson is that he and some of his buddies were sitting around one day complaining about how nobody in the media was speaking for their side, so they decided to head to Portland. Gibson has about as much control over Patriot Prayer as Gregory McKelvey had over the protesters who caused more than $1 million in damage after Trump’s election.
I wish I could share your opinion of OPB, Matt, but I don’t anymore. Anna Griffin, in particular, demonstrates a special kind of journalistic arrogance. When she was at The Oregonian, she appeared in the documentary “Alien Boy” about the death of James Chasse, the mentally ill man who was beaten by police.
In the documentary, Griffin denounces the beating but doesn’t stop there. She assumes she can speak on behalf of the entire city of Portland and that our “values” were violated by this case. Well, where were all these concerned Portland citizens and their values when Chasse needed his meds?
Maybe one of Griffin’s kids will grow up to be a Republican or a cop. She might lose some of her smugness.
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