In Oregon’s strained local news ecosystem, a longtime far-right political figure has found opportunity

Each month, some 14,000 residents of Clackamas County open their mailboxes to find something increasingly rare: a 40-page, full-color, locally-owned newspaper.

At a glance, Hoodview News looks like a well-funded community news outlet. Splashy front covers feature prominent local figures and business leaders. Inside, there’s reporting on East County politics, and the back pages list dozens of events, from farmer’s markets to community cleanup projects. All throughout the newspaper are ads from car dealerships, restaurants and, during election season, political candidates running for office in Clackamas County.

In one of the fastest-growing areas of Oregon, the emergence of a locally-owned print newspaper seems like welcome good news.

But a close examination of Hoodview News shows something more complex: less of a newspaper producing unbiased journalism, and more a venue for Fox News-style tirades on transgender rights, critical race theory, climate change, immigration, political protest and fearmongering about liberals.

“It’s propaganda couched in journalism, which is distressing,” Sally Stephenson, a resident of Sandy who receives the newspaper, told OPB.

Hoodview News is, in fact, the latest project of longtime Oregon political operative Mike Wiley — perhaps best known for his work as communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, or OCA, an ultra-conservative activist group that pushed stridently anti-LGBTQ ballot measures across the state in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1988, Wiley was the chief petitioner for Measure 8, which aimed to revoke discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ state employees. When 53% of Oregon voters approved that measure, it handed the OCA a political victory. (Later, Measure 8 was deemed unconstitutional.)

In 1992, the OCA spearheaded Measure 9, which asked voters to amend the state constitution to define homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” Voters rejected Measure 9, and the campaign for it has come to be remembered as a dark moment of outright bigotry in Oregon’s history. An Oregon Historical Quarterly article cast Measure 9 as “one of the most comprehensive — and harshest — anti-gay measures put to voters in American history.”

Since 2018, as media organizations across the state of Oregon have been hacked up and sold for parts by out-of-state conglomerates, Wiley has published Hoodview News. And while his time with the OCA ended 30 years ago, the newspaper appears to have become a place to tell people about community events and offer feel-good stories about the East County area, as well as to espouse and encourage a transphobic worldview.

“Men and women are not the same,” Wiley wrote in November 2023. “Why then are we tolerating the invasion of women’s sports, women’s locker rooms, and changing rooms? It is darkly hinted that unless we accept this, that troubled teens will commit suicide. Just like during COVID when it was threatened we would ‘kill grandma’ if we didn’t follow their mandates and lock downs, no matter how nonsensical.”

Wiley declined OPB’s repeated requests for an interview about his work with the OCA and on his anti-LGBTQ stances printed in Hoodview News. He did offer a written statement about local media.

“We have been sorry to see so many venerable local newspapers close across the state,” Wiley said. “It leaves those communities without a valuable and important source of news.”

Wiley’s reemergence as a newspaper publisher is troublesome to groups working to combat anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, especially because extremists have specifically sought to capitalize on such rhetoric in Clackamas County, where Hoodview News is distributed. Last summer, the Molalla Pride festival was canceled after organizers received multiple violent threats. In 2023, Oregon City Pride relocated due to threats; still, a cadre of neo-Nazis showed up to protest.

“People can write and publish whatever they want, but I think it’s concerning when there’s the facade of being a news publication and the legitimacy that comes with ads and the event calendar,” said Blair Stenvick, communications manager for Basic Rights Oregon, an advocacy organization that formed in the wake of Measures 8 and 9.

“One danger of legitimate local news declining is just people not knowing about things — not knowing what’s going on in their school board or their city council,” Stenvick said. “But it shows that when there is a vacuum, someone’s going to step in to fill it. And often that’ll be someone with a specific agenda and with resources.”

Hoodview News positions itself as an unbiased community newspaper simply trying to inform the public.

“With the disappearance of local newspapers has also come the waning of accountability of local governments,” Wiley wrote in his May 2024 column. “At Hoodview News, we are not trying to be tricky, or mean, or practice ‘gotcha’ journalism. That’s not us.

An early voice of the OCA

On a cold day in February 1988, Mike Wiley stood under a banner strung up in Salem, Oregon, that read “No Special Rights.” He was gathering signatures for the proposed Ballot Measure 8, which aimed to revoke protections against discrimination from LGBTQ+ state employees. Wiley, wrote an Oregonian reporter, “believes that sexual preference is a choice,” and framed anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ state employees as special treatment.

The OCA gathered 118,000 signatures in support of Measure 8, and the majority of Oregon voters agreed to pass it – a victory not just for the OCA, but for nationwide political efforts to normalize homophobia and LGBTQ+ discrimination.

Writing for the organization’s newsletter The Alliance, Wiley celebrated Measure 8’s passage on the front page. It was “a severe blow to the efforts of the militant homosexual community,” he wrote.

Today, that issue of The Alliance remains on permanent display at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education’s exhibition on discrimination in state history. Historians say the way the OCA found widespread acceptance for its bigoted agenda was by rebranding anti-discrimination laws as giving certain people “special rights.”

“Conservative activists,” historian William Schultz wrote in Oregon Historical Quarterly, “sought to mobilize voters by claiming that various minority groups were seeking special rights at the expense of ‘normal’ Americans.”

“An essential part of this process was finding language to convince voters that they already were on the conservative sides of these wars,” Schultz continued, “even if they did not yet realize it.”

The OCA emerged during an era when homophobia was a form of socially-acceptable bigotry in the country. The group asserted itself in Oregon politics long before the United States Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision affirmed the right to privacy for same-sex couples, and even before the military revoked its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy requiring members from keeping their sexuality a secret.

Wiley was essential to the OCA’s strategy for mainstream acceptance in Oregon — which often meant attacking the way the state’s newspapers and television stations treated his organization. In 1988, when Portland TV stations refused to run OCA-produced ads around Measure 8 — ads one news director called “distasteful” — Wiley called it “out and out censorship.” Later, in 1991, an editorial in The Salem Statesman-Journal said the group was on “a crusade of intolerance and prejudice;” Wiley led a picket of the newspaper.

Thirty years later, anti-LGBTQ conversations similar to those the OCA sparked in Oregon are a part of the public discourse in a way they haven’t been in decades. While some aspects of LGBTQ rights have become mainstream, opposing transgender rights has been adopted as a part of the mainstream Republican agenda. In December, then-President-elect Donald Trump said in a speech that he plans to “end the transgender lunacy” by rolling back discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ populations, excluding transgender service members from the military and inhibiting access to gender-affirming care.

On his first day in office, Trump signed two Executive Orders that could have been lifted straight from the OCA playbook: one revoking protections against discrimination of federal employees based on their sexuality, and another declaring that the federal government only recognizes “two sexes, male and female.”

During its heyday, the OCA was “trying to build a constituency for a version of the Republican Party that is much more similar to what we see today,” Seth Cotlar, a history professor at Willamette University who studies far right groups, told OPB. “It strikes me as very much like this stuff around trans rights now. It’s just a kind of continuation.”

Amy Herzfeld-Copple, executive director of the Western States Center, a Portland nonprofit that tracks extremist activity, compared the OCA of the 1990s to today’s groups like Moms for Liberty, which have called on schools nationwide to ban books discussing LGBTQ+ topics. Groups like these, she said, exploit “existing bigotry around what they perceive as culture war issues.”

“The tactics of anti-democracy and bigoted social movements may change, but what remains a constant is efforts to control communities, families [and] sexualities through exclusion and violence,” she said. “There’s always this open claim that anti-LGBTQ bigotry is a broad consensus building strategy.”

In today’s political environment, Wiley casts homophobic views as his “publisher’s perspective” in Hoodview News. In September 2024, Wiley wrote that progressive liberals believe “one of the most important human rights is men having the ‘right’ to identify as women and being able to enter women’s private facilities,” he said. “They seem to believe that biological men should have the right to take over women’s sports.”

“Have we become a nation that is more about government-dictated prices, crime without consequence, confiscatory taxes, radical gender ideology, victim-hood as a lifestyle, abortion up to the moment of birth, hostility between the races and genders, dismantling the traditional family, the suppression of free speech and countless other ‘woke’ ideas?” Wiley asked.

In October, Wiley authored a six-page cover story titled “Portland’s Descent into MADNESS.” In the sprawling column, Wiley dives deep into local history to make an argument that Portland is “a dysfunctional, dystopian city” and “a wilted, blighted, decaying shell of its former self.” In the piece, he points to all the reasons he believes this to be the case: the death of the Mount Hood Freeway project in 1974, the founding of Willamette Week, the election of Neil Goldschmidt, then Bud Clark, as mayor. He concluded this all made Portland “a nightmare of crime, disorder, and civic decay.”

In the same issue, Wiley wrote a column — headlined “Kamala? Time to Be Serious” — endorsing Donald Trump in the presidential race, but never referring to him by name. “Her opponent in November now actually seems to be more the candidate of ‘normal’ and calm,” Wiley wrote, cryptically. “Hey, the guy’s done the job before and we survived.”

Herzfeld-Copple called Wiley’s helming of a community newspaper “troubling.”

“It’s a disingenuous narrative platform,” she said. “We know that anti-democracy actors and movements seek to take over infrastructure, and media is part of that.”

Hidden in plain sight

Last January, Mike Wiley delivered a speech to the Gresham Rotary Club.

Before he took the mic, a Rotary member introduced Wiley to the audience: a fourth-generation Oregonian; a former “ordained business administrator” at a church and, later, a full-time pastor; and finally, the former owner of a publication called East County News.

The OCA was not mentioned.

It isn’t the first time Wiley appears to have sought to put distance between his time with the OCA, while continuing to repeat the group’s homophobic talking points.

In 1992, as momentum against Measure 9 gathered, Wiley made a run for a seat in the Oregon House, omitting his involvement with the OCA from his bio in the Oregon Voter’s Pamphlet. “Wiley is trying to hide his OCA ties,” columnist Steve Duin wrote in The Oregonian, describing the candidate as “pure OCA.” (Wiley lost in the general election.)

Last year, he told the audience at the Gresham Rotary meeting that “one of the reasons for Hoodview News is to preserve, protect, defend the rights that we have of the U.S. constitution,” he said. “When we were publishing East County News, the idea that the First Amendment, that the right to free speech, would ever be questioned, was just unthinkable. And yet today we see the right to free speech, freedom of the press, under assault. So we want to do our part to preserve these hard won rights.”

Oregon once enjoyed a vibrant ecosystem of local newspapers producing fact-based reporting. That has disappeared. According to data compiled by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, several counties in the state have no news outlet; others — like Wallowa and Union counties — have a single reporter covering several thousand square miles. Century-old newspapers in Lane County and Columbia County have shuttered. In Ashland, recent OPB reporting showed one news outlet appears to be run entirely by AI, and its mysterious owner has stolen real writers’ identities and work.

Related: The state of Oregon’s local media in 4 charts

In Clackamas County, Hoodview News is hardly the only media outlet: Out-of-state conglomerate Carpenter Media recently purchased 10 publications in the county from Pamplin. Each is staffed by a small team of reporters that reports from Canby to Sandy, Molalla to Lake Oswego, and distributes monthly publications in Happy Valley. The Mountain Times reports on issues around Mount Hood.

But Hoodview News is the only one mailed directly to residents.

“We want to publish a newspaper that people are proud to be in, that they’re proud to put their advertising in,” he said to the audience at the Gresham Rotary meeting.

Each month, Hoodview News features a full-color back page advertisement for Dick Hannah car dealerships, which has a location in Sandy. In response to a request for comment by OPB about Wiley’s anti-LGBTQ columns in Hoodview News, Dick Hannah Dealerships issued a statement.

“Our advertising appears across a wide range of publications that reach diverse audiences,” it said. “Our goal is to ensure our brand reflects our ‘Believe In Nice’ values. We also have media safeguards in place to avoid appearing in hurtful or harmful contexts. As the media landscape is ever evolving, we regularly review and update these safeguards to align with our commitment to inclusivity and positivity.” (Dick Hannah Dealerships is also an OPB sponsor.)

Dave Hoops, an internal auditor at Weston Kia in Gresham, said his company takes out a half-page ad each month in Hoodview News, instead of the Sandy Post, because Wiley’s newspaper is so firmly grounded in the local community.

“It’s not talking about politics you can’t control in other parts of the country. It’s pertinent to where you’re at,” he said. “We identify with their audience and those are our neighbors.”

Hoops was also unaware of Wiley’s views on the LGBTQ+ community. “Our dealership doesn’t have any policies on politics. We’re neutral, we have to be,” he said.

Some readers are pushing back.

Sandy resident Anna Curtin wrote a letter to the editor that was published in the April edition of the Hoodview News.

“Please stop with the irrational fear mongering about immigration,” she wrote in response to a past column by Wiley. “There is absolutely no evidence to support the author’s assertion that immigration has morphed into a ‘gigantic criminal enterprise.’”

“Hoodview News is the only ‘news’ that is direct mail that we have received from a news outlet,” Curtin told OPB when reached by phone. “I think it’s pretty much propaganda.”

Curtin said she notices that Wiley, with the help of several freelance reporters, covers hyperlocal events such as city council meetings, the water board and election results in her area — so she’s willing to look past Wiley’s views to find information.

Sandy resident Sally Stephenson also had a letter to the editor published in Hoodview News. “It bothers me that [the newspaper] comes through the mail service,” she said. “I take issue with that. Of course, I could not read it. That is my prerogative. I get my ire up every time I read his column, but I keep reading it.”

Sometimes though, she leaves it in her mailbox. “I’ve been known to write in big black pen on it and say ‘Return to sender.’”