During a segment of “Outside the Lines” Tuesday, ESPN host Bob Ley compared the Washington Redskins name controversy to Watergate and slavery.
Discussing a recent poll showing that 71 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing the NFL team in the nation’s capital to keep its name, Ley first called the issue a “media creation” and then went on to examine the reason for such support of the Washington football team’s nickname.
“Is this a media creation?” asked Ley. “Of course it is, but so was Watergate when it first started in the same town, incidentally. And 40 years after Richard Nixon left town with his playbook, nobody has a problem with the media’s role, anything but.”
“There are two ways to look at the polling we’ve been reporting tonight,” he expanded. “That continuing overwhelming support for the nickname may be resentment at expanding victimhood through an 80-year-old nickname when Indians who have been treated shamefully through American history have more real life concerns. But, you wonder what the polling back in the day would have been on the Emancipation Proclamation or letting that [Jackie] Robinson guy play with the Dodgers back in ’47.”
Ley labeled the NFL’s mistake of getting itself suck in a “moral corner” the “real mystery” of the Redskins controversy.
“This most powerful and PR savvy of leagues didn’t see this coming?” Ley said, dumbfounded.
Ley’s segment came just a day before the New York Daily News became the latest paper to refuse to identify Washington’s NFL team as the “Redskins.”
Other media outlets that have done so include the San Francisco Chronicle, The Kansas City Star, The Orange County Register, The Detroit News, The Seattle Times, Slate, the Washington City Paper and The Washington Post’s editorial board.
H/T NewsBusters
