The Beaumont Enterprise made it their mission to force PN-G to change mascots for a while. The sports editor wrote columns calling on the school district to do so, and basically mocked the community for admonitions about tradition. The final straw was when the paper’s cartoonist put out a political cartoon characterizing everyone in town as small-minded.
I am personally still furious at how one-sided the coverage was, particularly their outright refusal to mention the lead community activist calling the mascot racist tried out to be the Indian Spirit and lost the election when he was in high school. There was no attempt to research or contextualize PN-G’s traditions, either, despite ample material to work with. It was muckraking, plain and simple.
There was a drive, at the time, for people in Mid-County to cancel Enterprise subscriptions. It was devastatingly effective - and if they ever start up the woke coverage again, I’ll start calling for cancelled subscriptions again.
The sports editor’s refusal to use the team name ever since is, in a word, butthurt.
