Terahertz (THz) spectroscopy is used to measure permittivity (100 GHz-2.5 THz) of ZnO and CuO powders with low fill factor pressed into pellets in a polyethylene binder. We show that porosity (air) of such pressed pellets has a large effect on effective pellet permittivity (~10 %) and on the extracted permittivity of the oxide constituent (~150 %). We explore a twostep analysis based on sequential application of different effective medium models (EMMs), first to account for the air, and subsequently to extract the oxide's dielectric properties. We show that the combination of the Vegard's law and the Maxwell Garnett is the best to account, respectively, for the air and the oxides. In this regard, the capacity that this approach has to adapt to each phase's physical characteristics by using multiple EMMs is an advantage. The resulting oxide permittivities are significantly larger than previously reported for such pellets as a consequence of the porosity. We find for the real relative permittivities of CuO and ZnO ~12.1 and ~8.9, respectively, in the THz range.