Breaking news: BIPOC Portlanders were less likely than white Portlanders to think someone on the city council represents them and their interests. Or maybe that’s old news. 

It surfaced in a recent survey by the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center, conducted with support from the North Star Civic Foundation. When asked about the most important qualities in a city council member that would help BIPOC residents feel represented, 68 percent said “lives in or knows about your community.” An unsurprising finding if you’ve been listening to BIPOC Portlanders talk about life here. 

Also unsurprising if you’ve been listening to them talk about journalism. 

That’s because those comments are not unlike what BIPOC Oregonians tell us when we ask them how they feel about local news in Oregon. In a statewide survey, urban white college graduates felt most comfortable with how Oregon media represents them. Conversely among BIPOC Oregonians, 44 percent felt their race and ethnicity were negatively stereotyped in local news. Many could identify important events in their communities that didn’t make the news and could point to the ways the lack of coverage negatively affected their community or harmed them or their families personally. 

This is important. 

Social science tells us that when people don’t see themselves in the news, they don’t show up to public meetings, talk to their elected officials, or join civic groups like City Club or Rotary. They often don’t run for office. And sometimes they don’t bother to vote. So if representation in local news is important to getting people to engage with civic life at all, what happens when civic leaders are as non-representative as local news? 

At Oregon News Exploration our data show an alarming trend: that there’s a huge correlation between people’s ability to see themselves in the news and their ability to trust community leaders at all, apart from the representation issue.  

When we gave Oregonians a news article and asked them whether local experts were telling the truth or not, those who were already news consumers with established habits with fact-based media had higher confidence in city and county officials, political leaders, education officials, nonprofit leaders, religious institutions, even scientists.  

Those without those established habits trusted community leaders less. Only scientists earned trust from those surveyed more than half the time (61%). Those trusted less than half the time included: 

• Non-government organizations (46% of the time) 

• Schools (35%) 

• City and county officials (30%) 

• Party-aligned federal officials (27%) 

• Corporate leaders (11%) 

• Developers (11%) 

The takeaway is simple: trust is earned, and it’s earned by representing the people you serve. Building a better Oregon, a better Portland—one where everyone has confidence in civic life, leadership and shares a fact-based narrative about this place we live—means including everyone. 

This is why OVBC’s recent findings for North Star double down on the reasons for concern: 43 percent of BIPOC respondents said they wanted more of a presence of leaders on the city council who were focused on the needs of communities of color. Those communities had historically lived in parts of Portland with fewer amenities like parks, sidewalks, shade trees, clean air—things that not every Portlander enjoys in equal measure.  

BIPOC Portlanders who felt underrepresented in the survey were more likely more likely to think their neighborhoods were not improving, to be dissatisfied with their job and business prospects in Portland, and less likely to see Portland as a place to raise children. 

Portland’s new city council structure is in part intended to diversify the city’s leadership, and to put the representation back in governance that perhaps can partly address the dissatisfaction BIPOC respondents expressed. 

Putting the representation back in media is possible, too. It’s sometimes billed as harder fix than changing newsroom composition. And that’s because barriers to inclusion run up against the structural headwinds that limit access to higher education and the borrowing capacity to attend colleges and universities. Plus, the path to journalism jobs is often greased by unpaid or low-paid internships chiefly most accessible to post-grads of well means. 

But choosing journalists who can represent their communities while reporting can be as easy as hiring people from the communities who want to learn to do the work. It’s a matter of making sure they get the right training to become journalists. 

And there’s no reason why we can’t provide that training inside the newsroom. Which is one of the fun parts of cooking up a newsroom from scratch: we can invest in a model that creates these new pathways into the newsroom from people from more diverse backgrounds. And we want to.  

Someday we want our surveys to tell us that everyone feels represented by our products, not just the educated white urban people who we know are the primary consumers of news, and who look like the majority of working journalists in our state.