News-Record.com

Is it true? It seems legit.

Is it right? Depends on whether the goal here is good journalism or good television.

News organizations, especially TV ones, routinely fish for subjects. How do you think Springer and Montel get their guests? I've done it too in the past. When I covered education and I was working on a story about, say, a new reading program, I called around to different schools until I found a school that (a) was using it and (b) would make a teacher and/or classroom available to me and maybe a photographer.

What NBC is doing here is related. The big difference is the compensation. Dateline is offering to pay travel expenses to go to the race. That's a no-no here. It's one thing to tag along with someone who happens to be doing something. It's another to send a person into a situation on your dime so you can report what happens. That's not cool.

But is it good television, something pretty much divorced from journalism these days? It might be.

TV's cardinal rule is: No pictures, no story, and just saying that there's discrimination against Muslims isn't nearly as effective as showing it. At a Cup race, you have a crowd, where people act differently than they do one on one. Some of the fans have been drinking. And, yeah, almost all of them are white. Bill Lester didn't exactly erase the perception that NASCAR isn't a great place for black people, so, sure, Dateline might get the reaction it wants. All you need is a couple of drunken clowns in Dale Jr. hats in a crowd of 100,000 plus.

But now that the story has gained real-time momentum, what now troubles me most is the comparisons. Parading an Arab man through the main grandstand at TMS, the thinking goes, will generate the same reaction as hanging a George W. Bush campaign sign in the faculty lounge at Harvard or dropping off a white man through the streets of Detroit.

That's a lot of stereotyping -- and a lot of backhanded condemming of NASCAR in the same swipe. No one can say with a straight face that NASCAR is a shining example of racial tolerance. But to say that Seattle liberals will spit on your U.S. Navy uniform so therefore racing fans will throw beer at these undercover Arabs ... come on, you're not giving anyone the slightest bit of credit.

If Dateline really wanted a negative reaction, they wouldn't send these guys to a race with a head scarf. They'd spring for a Jeff Gordon jacket.

Also: Instapundit doesn't know beans about racing, and his e-mailer knows less about baseball? You know how much dead air a baseball play-by-play guy has to fill? Think of a long green flag run at Texas times 9 innings.

4 p.m. update: Now I'm thinking like the Diecast Dude, who came up with the same punchline three hours before I did (no, I didn't see his post): Want to get loathing by some self-made parody of Larry The Cable Guy's parody of a stereotyped hick, directed at innocents, on film? No problem ... follow a couple of Gordon fans around Talladega..

The Dude also makes a good point about the ethnic makeup of the fans at California Speedway, his home track: At Fontana you see white and black and brown and yellow all mixed together without a thought given to skin tone, given how all in attendance are unified by two common bonds: wondering why Earnhardt the younger never runs well here, and wishing they'd put some banking in the place.