The media’s coverage of sports events provides a fascinating insight into how those who report use the news for political ends.
Throughout sports history, a number of teams have honored or commemorated certain groups by adopting their names. The fighting Irish of Notre Dame. The Minnesota Vikings. Even the most renowned sports franchise, the New York Yankees, acknowledges the nickname used around the world for Americans. There are no sports clubs that take titles intentionally meant to be pejorative. There are no teams entitled the “The skunks,” “The idiots,” or the like. So what is the weird ruckus over the Washington Redskins?
Adding to the strangeness of this nonissue is the fact that opponents of the title are extremely hard pressed to find actual Native Americans who are offended by it.
Before coming to a conclusion about what this debate is all about, consider another odd media choice related to both sports and the wider world.
Though the viagra 50mg price market is making a noise with the sound of effective and cheap Kamagra, yet there are some other ways to improve quality of sexual life. New technologies allow users to exchange various types of data like text, audio and video tadalafil pharmacy online files. We seem to be doomed, by our own example, to show each new generation of the workforce the same model of how tadalafil cipla not to manage people. viagra generika Similarly the sugar level in our body and needs to be controlled with numerous restrictions over our daily diet and life procedure. There has been a great deal of attention devoted to the terrible incident in which a professional football player, Ray Rice, brutally and inexcusably assaulted his then fiancée and now wife. The athlete has correctly been suspended from playing, and has also lost out on lucrative endorsement contracts.
However, precisely the same newspapers and television networks that have carried this story virtually nonstop since it came to light have tread very lightly on the far more serious issue of Islamic oppression of women. In Front Page magazine, Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chester outline the wide range of ways in which females are deprived of basic rights and subjected to horrific treatment, from mutilation to rape and murder to mass enslavement Yet the major media, and even western Women’s rights groups, have devoted far less airtime to this overwhelming pattern of human rights abuses then they have to the single instance of one football player’s criminal act.
The Redskin debate is sheer nonsense. The Ray Rice issue is completely valid, but it is a single drop in an ocean of abuse that is consistently downplayed in the news. The reason for these journalistic decisions is unfortunately clear.
An unfortunately large portion of America’s media and political elite seeks to gain by emphasizing what divides Americans, rather than what unites them. There are legitimate grievances endured by Native Americans, but a sports club’s use of a commonly used nickname isn’t one of them. Discussing it, however, does gain a great deal of publicity. Criticizing the terrible acts of extremists overseas provides no political benefits to the divide and conquer crowd, so it is ignored.