Ms. Bottomly Takes a Knee

The Oregonian plumbs new depths of white guilt

Golly! It’s tough to be a white person these days, especially if you are the editor of Portland’s newspaper of record. And now Therese Bottomly, the Oregonian’s latest editor, once again proves that her newspaper, as usual, is about, oh…a year behind the Big Story. Take a knee? How yesterday can you get?

But there she was, on the O’s chaotic web page…

I unreservedly apologize to our readers and our community for the racism in this newspaper and the legacy it leaves.

…which surely goes down as one of the most extraordinary bits of journalism within memory. You could hear the laughter in City Hall and the county building and in more than one executive suite around town; it will no doubt be an item of incredulous conversation at the Athletic Club and the other cubbyholes where the people who think they run the town gather to reassure themselves that they matter. Jeepers—even the Portland Museum of Art’s Director, Brian Ferriso, who has offered up his institution on the altar of equity, hasn’t dared to go quite this far.

As for the board room of the Coalition of Communities of Culture—high-fives all around! The propagandists for the blatantly racist proposed city charter, as well as the galaxy of other racial-gimme outfits, must be salivating at what Ms. Bottomly has said, more or less explicitly: We’ll lay off the black community and its evident foibles…and you’ll have the whip-hand when it comes to our coverage of the issue of race in this town. We were timid to the point of blindness before—but you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!

As for the other news barons at other “platforms,”…well, one can only imagine what they’ll say when they’re out of earshot of anyone who might turn them in to the equity cops. Anyone else ready (or willing) to grovel?

We’re waiting…

One could do a line-by-line edit of the confessional—something the O’s dwindling number of editors aren’t very good at—but that would burn up Substack’s length-limits. So let’s go to the Highlights Reel!

• “…the legacy it leaves.” Odd, there was no mention about what the O is doing in that department right now. Latest sins? We’re dying to know.

• “After George Floyd was murdered, thousands of people marched in the streets to demand social justice.” In another part of her confessional, Ms. Bottomly allows that it was a “social justice uprising.”

• “…the institution today can learn from those failings and work to correct mistakes we make in more modern times.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for a laundry-list of current “mistakes.”

• “And we contracted with five BIPOC community members who reviewed the drafts to provide more feedback, with an emphasis on evaluating word choice, checking for blind spots and limiting further harm to communities of color.” Care to tell us what they got paid? They were named—but no hint as to why they were selected to be censors.

• “….analyze for the first time the diversity of the people quoted in our articles.” Sounds like quota-time. What are the numbers?

• “…help guide staffing decisions.” Yup. Quotas.

…and so Ms. Bottomly informs the paper’s readers that the O is now all-in on the same DEI mind-control that infests our state’s (and the nation’s) universities and public schools and not a few corporations.

There will be “listening sessions,” and there’s yammer about “implicit bias” (aka: if you’re white you’re automatically a racist), and there will be an “analysis” of the diversity of people quoted, and there will now be an official DEI czar in the newsroom, a brand-new “senior editor for inclusive journalism, to help guide staffing decisions,” which must be terribly good news for the paper’s managing editor. And for any of the white staffers who know, in their bones, that the future of the Oregonian will feature more layoffs. Who gets the first chop?

Odd, isn’t it, that Ms. Bottomly didn’t seem to want to mention any of the paper’s current biases and failures. Just to pick at random…

• The non-mention of the Hoover Gang before the feds brought their RICO suit and convicted its well-known leaders. The paper finally ran two stories during the trial—but never dared to connect the Hoovers (and their money and muscle) to their impact on the drug markets and the “community.” Can’t go there.

• Nor has the O ever bothered to dig into the actual reasons for the disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks.

• Nor has the O ever noticed that, despite the vap-yap about how white people run this town, the Portland City Council is controlled by POCs—and will continue to be no matter if Commissioner Hardesty gets the boot.

• Nor did the O ever muse about the over-representation of POCs, mostly black, on the Charter Commission.

• Nor has the O ever mused about the high number of abortions or one-parent families that are disproportionate in the black community

And rest assured—you never will read about any of this bothersome stuff.

Ms. Bottomly sums it up with…

This history is hard to read but you must. And you must hold us to our pledge to always do better.

…which reads as an open invitation to our city’s megaphone-mouthed POCsters—who pick on white people with an abandon worthy of a Klocard—to line up to badger and belabor and besiege the Oregonian’s wobbly leadership. Golly! You’ve to wonder how this genuflection is going to go down with the hard-eyed New Yorkers who actually call the shots. Well—it’s Portland, and whattya expect?

Ms. Bottomly signs off with an invitation to read “the project.” Which, as it turns out, was written by—gasp!—a white fella, Rob Davis. And because he was a white person, Mr. Davis had to labor (for what seems like forever) under the newspaper’s distrust, which Ms. Bottomly made clear…

The newsroom took numerous steps to identify blind spots or implicit bias.

…which, of course, poor Mr. Davis could not possibly have recognized on his own, since he is a white person.

And in the project backgrounder, in which the O suggested counseling for…

…readers who are retraumatized by these stories.

….we found out that the O has taken a proper racial census (DNA samples, perhaps?) of its ever=shrinking newsroom and finds that…

Twenty-five percent of our newsroom identifies as people of color, multiracial or Latino/a/x.

….(not that Hispanics seem entranced with that white-awarded term), which proves, well…nothing, since the last census indicated that minorities are, in fact, almost mathematically represented, since whites now make up 75.3-percent of the population—a number that has been steadily falling. (As even the O has dared to note.)

Well, I guess you can never have too much “equity,” or, for that matter, define it.

But let’s set all this aside…and watch as Ms. Bottomly, in her promised regular reports to her readers, does the Diversity Two-Step. With the assistance of all those POC non-profits and pols and DEI czars and racial boo-birds.

Strike up the band!