I have a vague memory of having written a while back that the left never apologizes, and never says that it was wrong about anything.
That makes it a bit hard to reconcile a recent front-page story in the Washington Post about their local NFL football team, the Washington Redskins. In what was doubtlessly intended to have a different result, the Post had surveyed a statistically significant number of Native Americans across the country and with many different tribal origins.
The result? Some 90% of the respondents identifying as "Native American" had no problem with the Washington football team being called the "Redskins", and a healthy number thought it to be a good, as in complimentary, thing. This, of course, flies squarely in the face of a bazillion editorials and published letters to the editor in that paper complaining of the name and insisting it be changed -- including one the morning after.
In an interesting turn, the 90% figure appears to be virtually identical to the results of a similar survey about 12 years ago that also polled the same population. The separation of time, and the fact that the 2004 survey was done by a different organization, suggests that the data is pretty sound, and the results are usable for however a user may want to, well, use it.
I'll use it myself here, but only briefly. In terms of how much offense to glean from a poll of an affected group, I start with the fact that there is a spectrum -- from no one being offended all the way to everyone being offended. I believe that 1% of people taking offense for the perceived slur does not make it a slur. Obviously at 100%, it is a slur; in fact, I would pretty much say that you get as low as 50% and most people would agree that we should not use the term.
But I also feel that you get down to 25% and it's in the noise range, as far as actually asking people to change their actions. If three people out of four have no problem with a word or phrase referring to their group, or ethnicity or religion, then it seems to me it's the "one in four" who are overly sensitive.
And in this case, nine out of ten do *not *have an issue. So for my two cents, the issue of whether the football team -- whose nickname is shared, among others, by some high schools on reservations -- is resolved. Next issue, thanks. Move forward. The loud will not out-poll the numerous.
Which gets us to the point.
For the Washington Post, a very leftist paper which hates the name "Redskins", even to have printed the results of such a survey on the front page, with pictures even, is startling. It's startling not just because it flies in the face of what the paper's editorial board stands for, but because it makes the case that the concerns voiced by a loud minority, and the PC police who support them, are grossly misplaced -- and fundamentally unrepresentative of the alleged offended. And, of course, it's startling because the left never apologizes.
So why is was it even published?
I'm going to be speculating, because I don't know, and never will. But I think there are probably a few distinct elements at work here.
First -- even though an overwhelming percentage of journalists are leftists, and the reporting of events frequently has slant and even a stated opinion or two, the Post still recognizes that the editorial and news parts of the paper are separated by a nominal firewall. That's Journalism 101. Maybe 201, but at least it's fundamental. Send a reporter out on a story, especially when it's your own darned poll, and you had better print it.
Second -- had the paper squashed the story when it learned the results, all that had to happen was for one employee of the Post to have let the word get out that the polling was remarkably in contrast with the editorial staff's biases, and the proverbial stuff would have hit the fan. One thing a paper does not want to have happen is for it to be seen as letting bias affect the actual running of stories.
Third -- and this is the only FTM (follow the money) aspect I could come up with -- since the survey did not proactively target Native Americans, but rather asked the question only if they so identified, there must have been a lot of people polled, and a lot of work accomplished. The photographs alone suggest that some serious travel expense went on this story, meaning that it didn't get spent on alternative content. One way or the other, there has to be a headline (a piece for another day).
Finally, I do not doubt that someone back in the newsroom was so convinced that he or she was right on the issue, if not the facts, that the order was issued to run the story. "We'll get people talking about it", I suspect was the order, "and once they talk they'll see that the name is offensive." No matter what the polls actually say. It's the infernal pomposity and self-righteousness of the left.
OK, I don't know if any of the above is true, although the first one almost assuredly came up at some point. If so, it would be heartening to know that at least someone at the Post has a shred of journalistic integrity.
But it doesn't change the outcome. The name is not offensive, and now we have concrete evidence that it is not.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton
