Since Redskins owner Dan Snyder took over the Extremeskins.com message board back in 2005, its members have been happy to serve as his personal media attack dogs.
One of Snyder’s most extreme henchmen, Arthur Mills, who has more than 25,600 posts on Extremeskins.com, has frequently rallied the pack against any journalist who wasn’t typing in burgundy-and-gold. Mills, for example, headed up hate campaigns against Washington Post beat writers Jason La Canfora and Nunyo Demasio, including setting up a thread called The Nunyo Files that chronicled every alleged error that appeared under Demasio’s byline. In exchange for his attackery, Snyder gave Mills a seat in the press box during Skins games.
But last week, like overbred dobermans, the Extremeskins.com pack turned on one of its own. A poster pointed out some mistakes in a story on the team’s Web site by Casey Husband, who writes for the Redskins news service. In the build-up to Saturday’s draft, Husband had written about a three-team deal on draft day 1999 that the Skins were a part of:
[Washington] traded its 12th overall pick and multiple mid-round selections to the Chicago Bears for the fifth overall pick. Then the Redskins swapped first-round selections with the New Orleans Saints, dropping from fifth to seventh. The Saints got their man in running back Ricky Williams, while the Redskins drafted Champ Bailey and obtained a first- and third-rounder in 2000.
An astute Extremeskins.com member pointed out that the 1999 trade didn’t go down the way Husband’s story said it did. Instead, that year, the Skins dealt first with New Orleans, then Chicago. This revelation sent many folks on Snyder’s message board into Nunyo Files mode against one of the team’s paid messengers.
“There is no excuse for this Casey Husband guy to FUBAR it all up in that article – it’s his job to get it right,” read one posting.
“WOW – he works for THE MAN,” read another. “This d-bag [Husband] is Director Of Publications for the Washington Redskins……even more of a crime to FUBAR the facts up in that article. Now knowing he is the team publicist, his articles are worthless, especially draft week.”
Skins management stepped in to save their reporter. A poster identified himself as an editor of Redskins.com and ordered the attack dogs that were tearing Husband a new one to heel.
“Redskins.com strives for accuracy,” wrote the poster.
The erroneous passages were deleted from Husband’s story. No correction was ever appended to the unfiltered piece, however. Mills, who before his career of throwing bombs at Post writers had landed a single byline in that newspaper, hadn’t weighed in on the in-house screwups before the Husband-beating thread was removed from Extremeskins.com’s front pages.