Take a Bow, NASCAR Nation

If the goal is to get some Muslim-bashing on tape for an NBC Dateline segment, what group would lib elitists target in hopes of hitting the jackpot?

Where are the bigots?

Producers at NBC thought they could find a wealth of anti-Muslim sentiment among the NASCAR crowd.

According to the Associated Press, NBC sent "Muslim-looking men to a race, along with a camera crew to film fans' reactions."

..."It is outrageous that a news organization of NBC's stature would stoop to the level of going out to create news instead of reporting news," [NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications Ramsey] Poston said.

"Any legitimate journalist in America should be embarrassed by this stunt. The obvious intent by NBC was to evoke reaction, and we are confident our fans won't take the bait," he said.

..."Dateline is looking into this story," NBC said in a statement. "We were intrigued by the results of a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll and other articles regarding increasing anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States.

"It's very early on in our newsgathering process, but be assured we will be visiting a number of locations across the country and are confident that our reporting team is pursuing this story in a fair manner," it said.

Now really, who appears to be out of touch with mainstream America here? Who doesn't understand the mindset of the American people?

Members of the lib media, Blue State types, assumed that Red State NASCAR fans would mistreat the "Muslim-looking" plants.

That's an extremely offensive assumption to make.

They obviously have very little respect for the character and sophistication of the people that enjoy NASCAR.

At NASCAR.com, B. Duane Cross comments on the sting operations that NBC's Dateline crew is carrying out.

He writes:

It's hard to imagine that NBC News would try to entrap fans in a ploy to make its Dateline segment juicier. But apparently the network did just that...

In a statement released by NBC, it noted that more "plants" are in the works.

...Mind-boggling, that's the only way I know to describe that mentality.

...While NBC News is at it, why not send a few Kluxers into the infield at Talladega? Talk about being short-sheeted by the end of the night.

Fans of NASCAR are justified in being troubled by NBC's actions. It's such an ugly thing to do.

What if out of thousands of fans some doofus did respond unfavorably to one of their plants?

You can bet that the focus would be on the person behaving inappropriately. That needle in a haystack would be highlighted.

NBC News should know that NASCAR isn't the last bastion of redneck; the people at NBC Sports thought so much of NASCAR -- and its diverse fan base -- that it chipped in with TNT to spend $1.2 billion for broadcast rights the past six years.

When the network broadcast the Daytona 500 in February, it obviously had no problem associating with the NASCAR rednecks, yet the network was banking on getting a story tht would put NASCAR fans in a negative light.

NBC is in the final year of its contract with NASCAR. That's convenient timing, isn't it?

...Mike Smith, director of public relations for Martinsville Speedway, said that the Dateline crew's presence wasn't as stealth as it possibly hoped.

"Our security knew almost immediately that [the Dateline crew] were on site and they were monitored the whole time they were here, for obvious reasons -- their protections, fans protection -- and they were not disturbed," Smith said. "It says a lot about our fans.

"If there is an upside, it shows that the image so many people have of NASCAR fans is a false one, and it shows that not only at Martinsville Speedway, but at NASCAR tracks in general, it shows what type of security we have in place that can discover something like this, observe it and make sure nothing happens.

"We've gotten calls [Thursday] from fans praising our security and wanting the number for Dateline," Smith said. "As disappointed as we are, we feel pretty good about the end result."

NASCAR has a lot to feel good about. NBC, on the other hand, is in the middle of a PR nightmare.

The fourth place network can't feel too good about alienating millions and millions of Americans with their scheme to discredit the NASCAR community.

I find it ironic that in effort to expose bigotry, it appears that the real bigots are the Dateline producers who are doing this bit of investigative reporting, not NASCAR fans.

Perhaps NASCAR should consider sending some fans and a camera crew to one of NBC's social functions and capture on tape how these snobs react to real, hard-working Americans.

I bet that would be very enlightening.