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By: Ian Essling
Dateline NBC, in what most news outlets have considered an attempt to portray NASCAR fans as racist, staged an operation to insert Muslim-looking men into a NASCAR event while using video cameras to record fans' reactions.
NBC claims in a statement released shortly after the operation became public knowledge that “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.”
NBC contacted a man named Tarek El-Messidi, and that man sent out a press release asking for Muslim-looking men to volunteer for the project, men who were successful and spoke fluent English. Their requirements did not even list actually being Muslim as a requirement; instead, the volunteers needed only “look Muslim.”
These men would be sent to NASCAR races and marched through the stands and infield, while cameras captured the discrimination and racist remarks directed at them. Or so Dateline hoped.
Michelle Malkin, a popular conservative columnist, first posted the story on her blog on April 4th. By then, Dateline had already staged the first of its 'stings'; they sent some of their Muslim-looking recruits to the NASCAR Nextel Cup event at Martinsville, Va. on April 2nd, accompanied by an NBC camera crew.
To Dateline's dismay, these men did not even cause a ripple in the stands. Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, stated that there were “no incidents” reported at the track, and various fans that this writer spoke to noticed the Muslim men as an oddity only because they were constantly trailed by an NBC camera entourage.
Martinsville's director of public relations, Mike Smith, says that NBC's camera crew wasn't as unnoticed as they thought. “Our security knew immediately that they were here,” Smith explained, “They were not disturbed [by any fans].”
Not to be discouraged, Dateline planned to send their crew to the race the next weekend in Richmond. It was only at the last minute that they realized that the race was actually in Texas, but by then so many journalists and fans knew of the planned event that Dateline cancelled their visit to the races.
NBC and Dateline have been the subject of scornful remarks from fans, news media and journalists across the country for this stunt.
"It's hard to even call it journalism," Poston said, “Any legitimate journalist should be ashamed."
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