In the annals of great American press crusades, the Washington Post’s relentless campaign to force the Washington Redskins to change their name surely deserves a footnote.
For the past few years, the Post has argued in its news and editorial pages—sometimes on a daily basis—that “redskins” is a pejorative term for American Indians, and that calling the local pro football franchise by that name is both racist and offensive. By contrast, the Redskins ownership has argued that the term is intended as a compliment, not a slur: The team originated as the Boston Braves, but when it moved to the nation’s capital in 1937, the name had already been changed from Braves to Redskins, no offense intended.
For years, the irresistible force of the Post newsroom locked horns with the immovable object of the Redskins’ present owner, Daniel Snyder. Snyder has vowed never to change the name of the team and to support his position has always cited a 2004 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll that revealed fully 90 percent of Native Americans do not consider “redskin” to be a slur. The Post, for its part, routinely derided the methodology of the Annenberg poll and in columns, editorials, and news stories, demanded that the Redskins change the team’s name.
But then the Post made a tactical error: It commissioned its own poll on the subject, complete with proper methodology and detailed questions—and found that, yes, 90 percent of Native Americans do not consider “redskin” to be a slur, and that a substantial majority of American Indians like to be called “redskins.” To be sure, this also means that 1 in 10 Indians agrees with the Post about the name of the team; but since the premise of the Post‘s crusade was Native American opinion on the subject, the Post‘s argument effectively collapsed with the poll’s publication.
For its part, The Scrapbook attaches little significance to professional sports team names but is gratified that this particular teapot tempest has simmered down. We were struck, however, by a postmortem column written by a Post associate editor named Robert McCartney, a longtime Redskins fan who was also a coordinator of the name-change campaign: “It’s unsettling to learn now,” he wrote, “that I vented all that energy and passion on behalf of such a small fraction of the Native American population.”
What The Scrapbook finds unsettling, however, is that McCartney and his Post colleagues, by their own admission, had been prompted and manipulated not by public opinion but by Native American “activists” with a self-evident political agenda. This strikes us as a much more significant story than the etymology of the term “redskin,” and it speaks to media coverage of a broad range of emotive subjects—race relations, war, religion, sexual issues, you name it—in which political “activists” are presumed without evidence to speak for wider populations, especially when their opinions are congenial to journalists.
