Think Out Loud

Local newspaper in Clackamas County espouses anti-LGBTQ+ views

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Jan. 28, 2025 4:39 p.m. Updated: Feb. 4, 2025 10:03 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, Jan. 28

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Around 14,000 subscribers read the locally-owned community newspaper Hoodview News every month. Along with community events, feel-good stories about the eastern half of the county and advertisements, readers find columns that espouse and encourage a transphobic worldview. Hoodview News is published by 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. OPB journalist Leah Sottile joins us with the story.

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Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. In this time of news outlets struggling and news deserts expanding, you might think the emergence of a successful local paper would be good news. Each month, about 14,000 residents of East Clackamas County get a newspaper in their mailboxes. It’s called the Hoodview News. Inside, there’s reporting about local politics, there’s an events calendar, ads for car dealerships. But a close examination of Hoodview News also reveals Fox News-style tirades on transgender rights, critical race theory, climate change, immigration and more.

OPB reporter Leah Sottile did a story recently about Hoodview News, and she joins us now. Leah, good to have you.

Leah Sottile: Thanks for having me.

Norcross: We’ll get to the man who’s running this paper in a minute, but what can you tell me about where Hoodview News is and who it serves?

Sottile: Hoodview News says it serves Gresham, Estacada, Sandy and Boring, and that spans both Multnomah and Clackamas Counties. It’s a 40-page newspaper, it’s delivered once per month to people in those areas via mail, and it’s not by subscription. It just goes to certain zip codes.

Norcross: It doesn’t take subscriptions, so how is it funded?

Sottile: Well, advertising, primarily. Each month, the newspaper features full color ads from businesses in that region, most notably Dick Hannah Car Dealerships, which has a location in Sandy. They take out a full-page ad each month. And Weston Kia in Gresham also takes out a regular half-page ad.

Norcross: Your article focuses on the owner and publisher of Hoodview News. What can you tell me about him? His name is Mike Wiley.

Sottile: Yeah, so Mike Wiley has been around Oregon politics for a long, long time. He first ran for the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners 39 years ago, in 1986. And his platform was similar to what he talks about in Hoodview News today – that there shouldn’t be anti-discrimination protections preventing LGBTQ people from being hired for county and state jobs. And he lost that race.

In the late 1980s, Wiley became the communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, best known as the OCA. Likely, Oregonians first heard of the OCA because of Measure 8, which sought to revoke an executive order signed by then Governor Neil Goldschmidt, protecting LGBTQ state workers from discrimination. At the OCA, Wiley was chief petitioner of Measure 8. So it was his thing, and 53% of Oregon voters passed that measure. Sometime later though, Measure 8 was found unconstitutional.

I think the OCA is notable, too, and likely what most people remember because in the 1990s, the group pushed Measure 9, which aimed to change the Oregon Constitution to define homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” Oregonians voted that measure down.

Norcross: Mike Wiley’s bio on the Hoodview News site mentions a lot of things. It mentions his previous professional history as a publisher and his work in the church. It does not mention any of his work in politics or with the OCA. Is he trying to distance himself from that organization?

Sottile: Yeah, I think that’s the case now. And actually, I think that’s been the case for a while. In my reporting, I found that in the ‘90s, Wiley made a run for an Oregon House seat, but omitted the OCA from his bio that ran in the voters pamphlet. And at the time, a columnist at The Oregonian spotted that and pointed out to readers, “Hey, Wiley is pure OCA.”

But I think what’s interesting now is that despite never citing the OCA in his resume, Wiley continues to espouse the exact same talking points in Hoodview News as he did when he was a part of that group.

Norcross: OK, well, how does that show up in the Hoodview News? How would you characterize the editorial flavor of the paper?

Sottile: So the newspaper looks like a community newspaper. There’s a lot of profiles of business leaders, religious leaders, people in law enforcement, sometimes police officers themselves. There are articles about new restaurants when they open. There’s a humor column, so a lot of that kind of community newspaper flavor. There’s also a big calendar at the back that lists community cleanup projects and farmers' markets. So in many ways it does function like a local newspaper, and then there’s Wiley’s editorials that run at the beginning of the paper.

Norcross: And what are they about?

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Sottile: Well, each issue starts with Wiley’s “publisher’s perspective,” where there’s a big focus on what he calls traditional families and kind of a flag waving sort of patriotism – sort of this desire to go back to a 1950s version of America. From time to time, his columns are extremely transphobic. They rage about critical race theory, about climate science. It’s kind of like Tucker Carlson-lite, I would say.

He also authors a lot of the supposedly journalistic content in the paper too. So he isn’t only writing “publisher’s perspective.” He’ll write cover stories, he’ll write some of the profiles. And in October, he wrote a six-page cover story called “Portland’s Descent Into Madness” where he characterized Portland as in a state of permanent chaos, which he traced back to a lot of things in Portland’s history – like the election of Bud Clark as Mayor, the founding of Willamette Week, and the embrace of the motto, “Keep Portland Weird.”

Norcross: When I first heard about this and I read your article, my first thought was, this sounds like the common tension you’ll find in papers all over the place. Op-ed pages have a point of view, which may or may not bleed over into the other sections of the paper. Ideally they won’t, but sometimes they do. What’s different here about Hoodview News?

Sottile: What’s different is that there’s really no illusion about the standpoint that this paper is operating from. And so I think it poses an interesting question about trust with readers. How much can you trust that the news is being reported fairly and accurately if you know it’s coming from a longtime political operative and from a far-right worldview.

I think this is the reason why traditional newspapers don’t have the same people authoring editorials and opinion pieces as reporting the news. But in this case, this newspaper is run by Wiley and his wife Joan, and they cover pretty much everything.

Norcross: Is there any actual journalism in there?

Sottile: There’s some, yeah, but you’ll see things like a report from the county commission. You’ll see things on the water board. And I think what gives Hoodview News a little bit of credibility with local people. They’ll receive it in the mail and they might blow past some of the explicitly transphobic content, but see who won the local election or what’s going on with the water board.

Norcross: Leah, have you spoken with Mike Wiley?

Sottile: I haven’t. No, I’ve put in seven requests for comment. He, at one point, said a statement about the state of local media, where he expressed sadness that local newspapers are declining. Other than that, his wife Joan declined requests for comment from both of them.

Norcross: You reached out to some of the paper’s advertisers. What did they say?

Sottile: I think, in some cases, they were surprised. When I spoke to Dick Hannah, they said, “we have a motto called ‘Believe in Nice,’” or we have these sort of be-nice values and “we are not political.” So it was a little surprising for them to hear about it. And they said they’d be evaluating whether or not that was a place they wanted to be advertising. But they were clear, in both cases – with the Kia dealership as well – that this is one of the only local newspapers in that area. So they’re trying to get in front of people who live in the region.

Norcross: Speaking of the people who live in the region, you spoke to some of the people who actually get this paper. How do they feel about it?

Sottile: I spoke to a few residents and, for the most part, they were pretty annoyed by it. Some people said they just consider it junk mail and they put it right in the recycling bin, they don’t even look at it. Other people see it as outright disinformation about their community that gets delivered to them each month. And they’re concerned that the people around them might not know that it’s not really unbiased news.

Norcross: Are they living in a news desert? Do they have other options for getting information?

Sottile: I think that’s the really interesting thing because, unlike most counties in the state, Clackamas County has at least 10 other newspapers to choose from. In particular, the Sandy Post is operating right in the same area as Hoodview News and is run by Carpenter Media. So while there are other options, I think the difference is that Hoodview News automatically gets mailed to people and they read it. With those other papers, you have to subscribe to it, and that’s the difference.

Norcross: In your story you provide some interesting context about the state of print media in Oregon. This state used to be full of those small locally-owned community newspapers. They have shuttered one by one, and even in one famous example in Ashland, have been taken over by AI. And I’m wondering what your story says about this very big question now of how people are getting their information and if it can be trusted?

Sottile: The big question my story is looking at is kind of a quandary. So what’s better … a community that reads local news reported by someone with an explicitly hateful agenda, or a community that isn’t reading the news at all? It calls into question the entire model of how news organizations deliver their news to people. A lot of media outlets just sort of hope and wait for people to come to them, subscribe and give them money for the news.

But in this case, Mike Wiley has decided to simply mail his news and his worldview to people for free – and people read it. So perhaps there’s a lesson there that can be learned by newsroom leaders across the state.

Norcross: Thank you, Leah.

Sottile: Thank you.

Norcross: That’s Leah Sottile. She’s a journalist with OPB. She’s also the author of the book, “When the Moon Turns to Blood.” Her newest book is called “Blazing Eye Sees All.” She’s also the host and reporter for the “Bundyville” podcast.

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