The Gorilla in the Newsroom
On the Oregon Journalism Project, the Oregon Education Association, and what the donor list actually shows
There is a genre of investigative journalism in which the conclusion is reached before the reporting ever begins. The Oregon Journalism Project’s (OJP) April 22 article on the Oregon Education Association, written by Nigel Jaquiss, is a prime example.
The piece contains four major tells.
1. The Omission
The article reports that the union’s non-dues-paying membership has risen from fewer than 3,000 in 2018 to more than 10,000 today, representing roughly $5 million in lost dues annually. It presents this number as a simple market signal about union performance.
In reality, this figure is the intended outcome of a 40-year, union-defunding campaign culminating in Janus v. AFSCME. This campaign has been documented by Gordon Lafer in The One Percent Solution and traced organizationally through the Bradley Foundation, the State Policy Network, and the Freedom Foundation, the latter of which has run publicly acknowledged, door-to-door defunding operations across the Pacific Northwest.
Two things can be true concurrently: the legal and operational conditions were deliberately designed to weaken the union, and the 10,000 individual opt-outs reflect teachers’ choices in response to that environment. The post-Janus organizing failure is certainly OEA’s to own. However, reporting the decline in numbers without reporting the massive, funded campaign that produced those conditions is not investigative journalism.
2. The Sourcing
The OEA represents more than 40,000 educators across 197 school districts. Jaquiss interviews exactly none of them.
Instead, he interviews a retired lobbyist for the school administrators’ coalition, a graduate school dean, a centrist Democratic state senator, a Republican legislator, the founder of a charter-aligned reform group, and a former senator who left office five years ago. He includes only the union president and the lobbyist for obligatory response quotes. It is a thorough survey of opinion, provided you have decided in advance whose opinions count.
The article asks who speaks for kids and answers: legislators, deans, and policy entrepreneurs. The teachers themselves—the people whose working conditions and salaries the piece purports to analyze—appear only as a collective noun. They strike, they collect strike pay, and they picket. But they do not speak.
3. The Double Standard on Money
When Senate leadership funnels nearly $40,000 to defend Senator Janeen Sollman, Jaquiss treats the contributions as principled support for a colleague under attack. Yet, when the OEA gives Sollman’s primary challenger $10,000, he frames the contribution as bullying.
Defending an incumbent who voted with you is standard political practice; running a primary candidate against a legislator who voted against your priorities is the exact same practice in the other direction. Senate leadership out-contributed the OEA by roughly a 4-to-1 margin in this single race, but Jaquiss reverses the moral valence depending entirely on who is writing the check. This is not investigative journalism.
4. The Numbers
The article highlights ten employees earning over $230,000, a $30 million budget, $6 million in strike pay, and 25 days on the picket line. None of these numbers is provided with the necessary context.
The OEA represents 41,000 members across a state of 4,000,000 people. It employs staff to defend teachers in disciplinary proceedings, manages contract negotiations across 197 districts, runs lobbying operations, and maintains a strike fund that covered 25 days of work stoppage in Portland alone. Against that backdrop, the budget and compensation are wholly unremarkable. Portland Public Schools, as one contrasting example, operates on a $1.09 billion annual budget. By any standard the rest of Oregon’s nonprofit sector would recognize, an organization with a $30 million budget representing 41,000 members is not lavishly resourced.
On Who Gets to Speak
Having spent more than 25 years teaching, mentoring, and training educators and five years before that as a classroom teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I know what this kind of writing does. This is a genre in which working educators are described in aggregate, never in particular, ensuring that no actual teacher nor parent can be quoted to contradict the narrative.
Talk to actual teachers, and the frame falls apart. What educators will tell you about class size, behavioral support, administrative bloat, and the vast gap between administrator salaries and teacher pay simply does not fit the “union-versus-kids” narrative the OJP presents.
The Story Not Written
I will concede the underlying issue the OJP article gestures toward, even if it fails to actually investigate it. John Logan, the labor historian quoted briefly in the piece, makes the real point, though it is buried two-thirds of the way through.
Post-Janus, public-sector unions can no longer rely on agency-fee revenue. They must rebuild themselves as organizing institutions rather than mere service providers. Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts is the canonical text for this transition, and her framework is exactly what is required to make a rigorous critique of OEA’s post-2018 trajectory. New members must be actively recruited rather than automatically enrolled; member voice must be cultivated rather than assumed; and union democracy and organizer-to-member ratios must be rebuilt from the ground up.
These are the real post-Janus challenges. Instead of exploring them, the OJP article produces the shallow proxy of membership decline and presents it as absolute proof of failure. This editorial choice points directly back to the donor list.
The Donor List
The Oregon Journalism Project publishes its funders on a transparency page. The Founder’s Circle is anchored by the Ford Family Foundation (built on the Roseburg Forest Products fortune), the Harry A. Merlo Foundation (built on Louisiana-Pacific Corporation), Pacific Seafood, and Columbia Sportswear’s Tim and Mary Boyle (OJP’s board president, Peter Bragdon, is also a long-time Columbia executive). Columbia Sportswear established its global brand on offshored supply chains, while the timber foundations represent a political tradition that has rarely, if ever, allied itself with public-sector unions or progressive taxation.
There is no teachers’ union on the list. There is no AFSCME, no SEIU, no AFL-CIO affiliate, and no labor council. The dominant weight of the donor base is corporate Oregon establishment wealth, drawn from sectors whose material interests rely on constrained public budgets and weakened public-sector labor.
The OJP transparency page states that the organization “retains full authority over editorial content” and “maintain[s] a firewall between news coverage decisions and all sources of revenue.” It is standard boilerplate; every newsroom funded by interested money uses some version of it. You cannot definitively prove a firewall fails in any single article. But you can clearly see the pattern across many.
When a corporate-funded newsroom publishes an investigative feature that frames the state’s largest teachers’ union as the primary obstacle to educational improvement, the real finding is the bias itself. By declining to interview rank-and-file teachers and treating a union-defunding campaign as objective proof of failure, the coverage directly serves the donors’ political and economic interests. A stated editorial “firewall” does not erase this alignment; it simply allows the conflict of interest to operate without being named.
Bennett, the retired school administrators’ lobbyist that Jaquiss leads with, claims the OEA is “the gorilla in the room.” The real gorilla in the room of this article, however, is the donor list.
Oregon’s classrooms are in crisis. The funding has not produced the outcomes the Student Success Act promised, and reading scores remain unacceptable. None of this is in dispute. But none of it is a reason to accept the narrative the Oregon Journalism Project has chosen to publish.
A real investigation of Oregon’s schools would name the crisis, identify the defunding campaign, interview the actual teachers, track where the money went, and ask a critical question: Why does a reform coalition—funded by the exact same corporate sector that has spent 40 years working to defund public-sector unions—suddenly conclude that public-sector unions are the problem?
The Oregon Journalism Project will never produce that investigation. Their donor list explains why.