Michelle Malkin had a scoop yesterday: NBC's Dateline program put out a call for Muslims--but only those who "look Muslim"--to parade around at a NASCAR event, hoping to draw a hostile reaction from red-state "bigots" that NBC could film. So Dateline wanted to stage a fake news story intended to discredit NASCAR fans (i.e., conservatives) by catching them in the act of bigotry.

Michelle has follow-ups here, here, and here. The latest is that the Associated Press has picked up Michelle's story, and NASCAR has responded:

"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," 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.

What I think is funny, however, is that NBC actually did carry out their attempted "sting" operation, but came up empty:

The NBC crew was "apparently on site in Martinsville, Va., walked around and no one bothered them," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said Wednesday.

Not only has NBC admitted this ridiculous stunt, it vows to continue its search for anti-Muslim sentiment somewhere in America:

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.

Yeah, I'll bet. NBC is willing to go to great lengths to try to prove that Americans hate Muslims. What do you think the chances are that they'll show this video of American soldiers distributing Toys for Tots to Muslim Iraqi kids? Somehow, I don't think that's what Dateline finds "intriguing."

Posted by John at 08:42 PM  |    |