Mike Wise won't say "Redskins"?

Hey, who knew Spaceman was Dan Quayle?

 

Is this a serious question? He finds the term offensive and he's refusing to use it. That's taking a stand.

 

It's only offensive to 99 percent of people in this country because we are constantly reminded that we should be offended. It used to be a deraogatory term, but seriously it's just the name of a football team now.

Go ahead, rip me apart.

 

He hates the term "Redskins." Analogy stands. Again, if you wanna support kicking Journalism 101 (e.g., identifying the basic elements of a story....e.g., proper team name), in the goods, then support a stand that has no real nobility to it. For the most part, I've been on the liberal side of PC issues. But this is where it has run amok and has gone too far.

We let a columnist let his snit run amok, and we wonder why newspapers are swooning. Wise is not connecting with his readers. He's resolutely disconnecting.

 

I'd add something, but dools nails the right points on this one over and over.

 

I'm with shot and dooley on this.

As stands go, this ain't exactly Rosa Parks.

It's just self-indulgence that offers no payoff for the readers -- kind of like deciding you're going to write about "Eldrick" Woods because Tiger is just a nickname.

 

That's a poor analogy for the same reason the Royko/Mayor Daley one fails. No one would argue that those names are offensive. The name Redskins is, to some people. As for violating the basic tenets of journalism by not calling them the team by their official name, we do that all the time. Lots of newspapers don't call it the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl or the FedEx Orange Bowl or whatever the hell they are, even though those are their official names. We make those kinds of choices, and Wise has a right to his choice in a column. If he were the Redskins beat writer it would be a different story. The issue isn't whether we agree with his stand, it's whether it's appropriate for him to take one, and in this case, it is.

 

We often leave off "Tostitos." We don't leave off "Fiesta Bowl." That is what Wise is essentially doing. And ultimately, it's his employer's choice to allow him to do it or not. He's not bigger than the Washington Post.

And for the record, the Seminole nation wholeheartedly supports FSU and works with the school on the ceremonies you see at the FSU football games. So there goes one of his planks right there.

 

If I remember coorectly, The Seattle Times avoided using "Redskins" in display type. It was OK once in the body of the story.

 

he refers to them as washington -- so it's exactly like leaving off tostitos and saying fiesta bowl

 

And the FSU/Seminole issue is separate from the Redskins issue. Seminole is the name of a tribe, redskin is a slang and some would say derogatory term for a Native American. I haven't heard a whole lot of Native Americans wholeheartedly supporting the term redskins.

 

No it's not. The equivalent of using "Tostitos Fiesta Bowl" would be using "Washington Redskins Football Club Inc." or whatever the official corporate name is. The equivalent of using "Fiesta Bowl" would be using "Washington Redskins" on first reference, then alternating between "Washington," "Redskins," "the team," etc/

What if someone says "Redskins" in a quote that would be good for his column? Does he not use the quote because it doesn't jive with his effort to stand up for Native Americans?

And BJ, Wise used FSU as an example of the degrading of Native Americans, when the Seminoles do not seem to feel degraded at all. And on tangentially similar threads in the past, members who deal with Native Americans a lot have said that team names are way down on the list of concerns.

Despite the fact that we're just rehashing at this point, this thread is good in one sense: It's critiquing a columnist not named Whitlock.