Mike Bivins (journalist)

Mike Bivins is a journalist based out of Portland, Oregon, whose reporting about civil unrest in the United States has itself been the object of news coverage.

Early life and education

Bivins attended Benson High School.

Journalism career

Bivins was interviewed by the Washington Post about the 2016 Portland, Oregon riots, where car windows were smashed and fires were lit in protest of Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election.

In an interview with Spokane's alt-weekly, The Inlander, about his coverage of the 2016 riots, Bivins said that via his use of social media applications such as Periscope he is able to compete directly with large news organizations, some of whom have purchased his footage. Bivins is quoted in The Inlander as saying: "I've put my phone in my mouth.... And I'll crawl up onto high spots and get a better vantage point easier, because I don't have a big camera weighing me down."

Bivins captured Periscope footage of subsequently jailed conservative blogger Michael Strickland pointing a gun at numerous protesters during a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland. In a televised interview with KGW the following day, Bivins described the incident as "surreal," and said that he was unsure of how to react once the gun was put away by Strickland.

Bivins' coverage of an open-carry protest at the Oregon Statehouse, where supporters of Malheur Refuge occupier Ammon Bundy hung and burned an effigy of Oregon Governor Kate Brown, was mentioned in Eugene Weekly's Slant column:

As Bivins points out in his story this week, the effigy of Brown that was burned made reference to the Malheur occupation; when angry people flaunting weapons go stomping around the halls of government, we need to take note, especially since Oct. 1 marks the first anniversary of the Umpqua Community College shooting in which nine people, as well as the shooter, died as a result of gun violence.

KXRY program 5 Quadrants of PDX had Bivins on as a guest to talk about an article he co-wrote for Willamette Week about an uptick in white supremacy in the Portland area. On the program, Bivins talked about recent Ku Klux Klan activity at a local rally for president Donald Trump, as well as a group of self-described National Socialists being kicked out of a Portland bar<ref><xray.fm/broadcasts/16393/ref>.