PENDLETON — Gordon Smith is returning home.

Following 24 years in Washington, D.C., first as a U.S. senator then as the chief executive officer of the National Association of Broadcasters, Smith is stepping down to an advisory role with the lobbying group and returning to his birthplace: Pendleton.

In a video message announcing his retirement, Smith said he would step down at the end of 2021 to spend more time on his family business, his church and his family.

“Many of these things I have put on hold this past quarter century to give public service and to be among broadcasters,” he said. “I look forward to time with them, doing things that grandfathers ought to do: attending baseball games, recitals and more.”

As a lobbyist, Smith represented some of the largest radio and television broadcasting companies in the country, including iHeartMedia, Cumulus Media and the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And although providing news is only one part of what these broadcasters do, it’s one of the topics he chose to focus on in his farewell video.

“It has been my great honor to give the lion’s roar for broadcasters — those who run into the storm, those who stand firm in chaos to hear the voice of the people, those who hold to account the powerful — and to stand with those of the fourth estate who have the hearts of public servants,” he said.

Although he won’t be in Washington full time any more, Smith plans to use some of his time as an advisor for the association advocating for local media in an increasingly inhospitable climate.

Smith referred to himself as “a pea picker from Oregon,” albeit one whose family also owns a food processing business that produces millions of pounds of peas, corn, carrots and lima beans per year.

Smith made a name for himself locally by taking over Smith Frozen Foods and its facility in Weston. But politics also ran through his blood.

His father was an assistant agriculture secretary during the Eisenhower administration and Smith has several cousins who have served in the U.S. House and Senate in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

Smith won a seat representing Pendleton in the Oregon Senate as a Republican in 1992 and was elected Senate president a few years later. In 1996, Smith sought an open seat in the U.S. Senate only to narrowly lose to Ron Wyden, the first time the state elected a senator by mail. Smith would get a second shot at the Senate later that year when Mark Hatfield retired, and this time he prevailed.

Smith would go on to serve two terms in the Senate before he lost reelection to Jeff Merkley in 2008, putting an end to his political career. He stayed in Washington and joined the National Association of Broadcasters a year later.

Starting next year, Smith will serve as an advisor to the broadcasters association, necessitating only a few trips to Washington per year.

In a Thursday, April 8, interview, Smith said he plans to use some of those trips to lobby Congress to take steps to save local media.

The past 20 years have not been kind to local newspapers and broadcasters.

As the internet became one of the dominant forms of consumption and communication, local businesses stopped advertising with local media outlets and started flocking to a handful of tech giants like Facebook and Google.

Local media outlets relied on these advertisers to fund their news operations, and, as a result, many of them shrank or shuttered. According to a 2019 study from the Brookings Institute, more than 65 million Americans live in a county where there is only one newspaper or none at all.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these trends, and the effect is being felt locally.

In March 2020, the EO Media Group, the parent company of the East Oregonian and Hermiston Herald and the owner of more than a dozen newspapers in Oregon and Washington, laid off 47 employees company-wide, including eight locally. Since then, the company has also closed its Pendleton printing facility and laid off another 20 employees.

Working with broadcasters, Smith said the same trend is happening at local TV and radio stations, and much of that has to do with the way tech companies have dominated the advertising market.

Conducting the interview from his phone on a trip through the Columbia River Gorge on his way back to Pendleton, Smith said tech companies were not only hurting local journalism by consolidating the advertising market, but also elevating bad journalism and misinformation that tends to proliferate the web.

“They are cannibalizing the advertising market, taking broadcaster and newspaper content, putting it online and then competing against it for advertising dollars,” he said. “At the end of the day, good journalism costs money. They don’t care about localism or journalism. They just care about making money.”

Smith said the solution to local media’s decline could lie in Australia, where the country passed a law that requires tech companies to pay news outlets for their content posted on the companies’ platforms.

Nearing 70, Smith said his move back to Oregon does not presage a return to politics. He said his passion for elected office died when he lost re-election in 2008 while acknowledging the state’s leftward turn would make it difficult for a Republican to try to win.

And once he returns to Pendleton full time, he has no intention of leaving.

“I was born in Pendleton and I will die in Pendleton,” he said.