Another, yet un-noted departure was Dan Tilkin, one of the last real broadcast journalists to depart KOIN TV after 25 years. Already that station, which drove reporter Jenny Young out for her understated allegiance to Israel, is sounding more politically correct and thereby less trustworthy!
PDXReal is doing good Gonzo Journalism, but we need real, in depth quality fare like Portland Dissent, as the passing of Charles Peters of the iconic WASHINGTON MONTHLY shows is!
Another great article full of important questions. I love PDX REAL and so apparently do a lot of other people, from Portland and elsewhere. People gravitate to PDX REAL because they know they're going to get truths no one else will focus on.
Off topic but why does PPS IG bio have #blacklivesmatter what about white lives, how is that not discrimination against kids of other color than black???? Sick
I look at it this way. In our country, white lives have **always** mattered . Yet black people didn’t matter “ as much”. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t own homes. They couldn’t swim in our public pools .. so funny thing, black kids had higher drowning rates.
My Vietnam vet husband grew up in the very southern part of Illinois... he served with black guys who became his close friends. Yet even in the 1960’s (back here in the states) they couldn’t eat at the same restaurants!
We’ve fixed most of those things in our laws, in order to form a more perfect union.
So. In my opinion , “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t hurt my little white granddaughter. She actually “gets it” ... that we need to be aware of our history . It’s real. Things happened. We’re doomed to repeat history if we don’t understand it.
On the other hand, our white granddaughter is not being made to feel guilty about things that happened way before her time.
So for me, it’s “ Black Lives Matter ... as much” as white lives.
Let's go back to the halcyon days of, say, 2020 when uttering the words, "All lives matter" would have gotten you "milk-shaked" by antifa.
As we now know, BLM had nothing to do with civil rights--it was a money-making scam that enabled key players to buy multiple houses. No one knows exactly where the money went because--don'tcha know?--they're a charity.
I recall that in the Bad Old Days, many white kids went down south to ride buses and integrate lunch counters. Whites were murdered in the struggle--ever heard of Viola Liuzzo? Or James Reeb? There were whites deeply involved in the March on Washington, where MLK uttered words that our nonprofit neo-racists now ignore...or abhor.
The worm turns and the Evanston, IL (where I went to college and lived) school district has resegregated classes by race. For the good of the kids and their "comfort," y'know.
I, too, congratulated Angela and Jeff last night. I was an early (paid) subscriber to their Insta content. They've helped poke holes in the media bubble this long-time progressive Dem found herself in. And I've met Angela in "real life" - she doesn't just talk the talk. I spent a few hours with her early this fall sorting donations for the unhoused/sick/drug addicted in Old Town. You know, where you're straight-up scared to park your car even if your wheels aren't fancy.
So, about those donations. Angela provided info on the PDX REAL site about WHERE to donate to make an impact quickly and directly.. That would have been enough. I took the donations down there to a program I'd learned about on her site. But then I found myself spending the afternoon with her, sorting and organizing said donations.
So, Angela does stuff. She inspires other people to do stuff. Me? I was quite active in the Midwest community I left in 2018 (PDX grandchild nuff said). But I could not figure out how to "plug in" here. (I've since learned I am the "wrong" kind of liberal. Working on it. )
So it's my opinion that Angela and Jeff are the real deal and when commenters tell them just to "leave Portland if they hate it so much" they're missing the point.
I am concerned, though, about something bigger than PDX Real. I've engaged a little bit with Angela about it and her general response is that she's hyper-focused on local issues. That's fair. She doesn't exist to debate national politics with me - or to fix them for me, either. Some readers of her site seem to expect both.
But - what if - as we learn about the problems in Oregon government from citizen journalists like Angela and Jeff... what if we DO decide to "throw the bums out"? Will we find their replacements (I'm talking the national GOP and the state party tends to fall in line see: 2016-2020) to be so authoritarian and anti-democratic that "citizen journalists" find themselves on the wrong side of the law if they offend the administration? I sure hope not.
Last year, The Oregonian’s Therese Bottomly devoted an extensive investigation into the newspaper’s racist past (which, given the times, wasn’t any more racist than other papers). It gave her a chance to wallow in public and presumably cleanse her conscience.
The O may eventually disappear, but journalism won’t. A future journalist studying the demise of the state’s largest newspaper could point a finger at Bottomly’s news judgment in wasting depleted staff to such a questionable project and her engagement in “viewpoint discrimination.” (See the Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Matal v. Tam.) It’s a contributing factor to the paper’s weakness.
As Cheverton puts it, Portland as reflected in the local media is a “one-party machine-run town where the loudest megaphones are wielded by shape-shifting radicals, neo-racists, sexual-choice evangelists, cocktail-Marxists. …The megaphones are so loud that anyone who’s not on the progressive bus doesn’t have any idea that other opinions exist.”
That Jeff and Angela are not traditionally credentialed is historically in their favor. Maybe journalism is returning to its roots.
America has had some outstanding journalists who followed unconventional paths. One of them died last week at the age of 96 — Charles Peters, the founding editor of The Washington Monthly.
The New York Times described it as “a small political journal that challenged liberal and conservative orthodoxies and for decades was avidly read in the White House, Congress and the city’s newsrooms. … With no experience in journalism, (Peters) began with the premise that Washington worked poorly, and said his magazine would examine its culture ‘the way an anthropologist looks at a South Sea island.’”
The Times allows subscribers “gift links.” Here’s the one to Peters’ obit:
Imagine our surprise today when we went to read Portland Dissent and saw PDX Real's 100K graphic. Angela and I throughly enjoyed your take on this journey we are embarking on, through your eyes we have more faith in the great unknown.
Well said, Richard.
Another, yet un-noted departure was Dan Tilkin, one of the last real broadcast journalists to depart KOIN TV after 25 years. Already that station, which drove reporter Jenny Young out for her understated allegiance to Israel, is sounding more politically correct and thereby less trustworthy!
PDXReal is doing good Gonzo Journalism, but we need real, in depth quality fare like Portland Dissent, as the passing of Charles Peters of the iconic WASHINGTON MONTHLY shows is!
Another great article full of important questions. I love PDX REAL and so apparently do a lot of other people, from Portland and elsewhere. People gravitate to PDX REAL because they know they're going to get truths no one else will focus on.
Off topic but why does PPS IG bio have #blacklivesmatter what about white lives, how is that not discrimination against kids of other color than black???? Sick
I look at it this way. In our country, white lives have **always** mattered . Yet black people didn’t matter “ as much”. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t own homes. They couldn’t swim in our public pools .. so funny thing, black kids had higher drowning rates.
My Vietnam vet husband grew up in the very southern part of Illinois... he served with black guys who became his close friends. Yet even in the 1960’s (back here in the states) they couldn’t eat at the same restaurants!
We’ve fixed most of those things in our laws, in order to form a more perfect union.
So. In my opinion , “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t hurt my little white granddaughter. She actually “gets it” ... that we need to be aware of our history . It’s real. Things happened. We’re doomed to repeat history if we don’t understand it.
On the other hand, our white granddaughter is not being made to feel guilty about things that happened way before her time.
So for me, it’s “ Black Lives Matter ... as much” as white lives.
Let's go back to the halcyon days of, say, 2020 when uttering the words, "All lives matter" would have gotten you "milk-shaked" by antifa.
As we now know, BLM had nothing to do with civil rights--it was a money-making scam that enabled key players to buy multiple houses. No one knows exactly where the money went because--don'tcha know?--they're a charity.
I recall that in the Bad Old Days, many white kids went down south to ride buses and integrate lunch counters. Whites were murdered in the struggle--ever heard of Viola Liuzzo? Or James Reeb? There were whites deeply involved in the March on Washington, where MLK uttered words that our nonprofit neo-racists now ignore...or abhor.
The worm turns and the Evanston, IL (where I went to college and lived) school district has resegregated classes by race. For the good of the kids and their "comfort," y'know.
I, too, congratulated Angela and Jeff last night. I was an early (paid) subscriber to their Insta content. They've helped poke holes in the media bubble this long-time progressive Dem found herself in. And I've met Angela in "real life" - she doesn't just talk the talk. I spent a few hours with her early this fall sorting donations for the unhoused/sick/drug addicted in Old Town. You know, where you're straight-up scared to park your car even if your wheels aren't fancy.
So, about those donations. Angela provided info on the PDX REAL site about WHERE to donate to make an impact quickly and directly.. That would have been enough. I took the donations down there to a program I'd learned about on her site. But then I found myself spending the afternoon with her, sorting and organizing said donations.
So, Angela does stuff. She inspires other people to do stuff. Me? I was quite active in the Midwest community I left in 2018 (PDX grandchild nuff said). But I could not figure out how to "plug in" here. (I've since learned I am the "wrong" kind of liberal. Working on it. )
So it's my opinion that Angela and Jeff are the real deal and when commenters tell them just to "leave Portland if they hate it so much" they're missing the point.
I am concerned, though, about something bigger than PDX Real. I've engaged a little bit with Angela about it and her general response is that she's hyper-focused on local issues. That's fair. She doesn't exist to debate national politics with me - or to fix them for me, either. Some readers of her site seem to expect both.
But - what if - as we learn about the problems in Oregon government from citizen journalists like Angela and Jeff... what if we DO decide to "throw the bums out"? Will we find their replacements (I'm talking the national GOP and the state party tends to fall in line see: 2016-2020) to be so authoritarian and anti-democratic that "citizen journalists" find themselves on the wrong side of the law if they offend the administration? I sure hope not.
Last year, The Oregonian’s Therese Bottomly devoted an extensive investigation into the newspaper’s racist past (which, given the times, wasn’t any more racist than other papers). It gave her a chance to wallow in public and presumably cleanse her conscience.
The O may eventually disappear, but journalism won’t. A future journalist studying the demise of the state’s largest newspaper could point a finger at Bottomly’s news judgment in wasting depleted staff to such a questionable project and her engagement in “viewpoint discrimination.” (See the Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Matal v. Tam.) It’s a contributing factor to the paper’s weakness.
As Cheverton puts it, Portland as reflected in the local media is a “one-party machine-run town where the loudest megaphones are wielded by shape-shifting radicals, neo-racists, sexual-choice evangelists, cocktail-Marxists. …The megaphones are so loud that anyone who’s not on the progressive bus doesn’t have any idea that other opinions exist.”
That Jeff and Angela are not traditionally credentialed is historically in their favor. Maybe journalism is returning to its roots.
America has had some outstanding journalists who followed unconventional paths. One of them died last week at the age of 96 — Charles Peters, the founding editor of The Washington Monthly.
The New York Times described it as “a small political journal that challenged liberal and conservative orthodoxies and for decades was avidly read in the White House, Congress and the city’s newsrooms. … With no experience in journalism, (Peters) began with the premise that Washington worked poorly, and said his magazine would examine its culture ‘the way an anthropologist looks at a South Sea island.’”
The Times allows subscribers “gift links.” Here’s the one to Peters’ obit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/us/politics/charles-peters-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE0.PZJS.EnJOXNVUYLm9&smid=url-share
Imagine our surprise today when we went to read Portland Dissent and saw PDX Real's 100K graphic. Angela and I throughly enjoyed your take on this journey we are embarking on, through your eyes we have more faith in the great unknown.
Congrats PDX Real!
Thank you!