Photo by Fred King

A group of former Federal Communications Commissions officials, led by the agency’s mid-1990s leader, are proposing a new tactic for compelling the Washington football team to change its name.

Broadcasters should treat it as an obscenity unfit for on-air utterance, a letter to team owner Dan Snyder signed by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt reads. “It is impermissible under law that the FCC would condone, or that broadcasters would use, obscene
pornographic language on live television,” Hundt writes, noting that the airwaves are technically owned by the public. “Similarly,it is inappropriate for broadcasters to use racial epithets as part of normal, everyday reporting.”

The letter, which is co-signed by 11 other former FCC officials and activists, refers to the team as the “XXXskins” and compares it, rightly, to other racial slurs that any thinking broadcaster would never say on the air. The name of the Washington football team, of course, is said countless times in the course of broadcasting its games and reporting on the organization.

In an accompanying op-ed that appears in today’s edition of The Washington Post, Hundt writes that the FCC has the power to investigate “whether broadcasters’ use of derogatory names to describe sports teams and players comports with the public interest.” That the Washington football team’s name is distasteful is a position that appears to be growing, though the FCC cannot fine any broadcaster for saying its name.

Not that Hundt doesn’t boast about the punitive measures he took while running the FCC. He notes, in his op-ed, that he levied fines against Howard Stern, whose producers ultimately settled with the agency in 1995 for $1.7 million. Though fines against NFL broadcasters for mentioning a team’s name are beyond the FCC’s purview—and, frankly, would be an extreme abuse of regulatory power—Hundt wants networks that cover professional football to take up the cause to get the team to change its name.