If they did this on the SDMB, it would be called “trolling”.
I rather expect, next time, that they will simply stage the incident so it goes off as they want it to.
Of course, they will defend themselves when they get caught by saying that it was a real story, even if the documents turned out to have been forged. 
Regards,
Shodan
It’s called investigative journalism. People do it all the time. Sometimes a story comes out of it. Sometimes, there isn’t. In a world where news is funded by ad dollars, a story like “NASCAR fans normal people” doesn’t play well. I’m sure if they didn’t have the ratings breathing down their necks they’d show all kinds of different stories.
And, well, sometimes this stuff is fruitful. Anyone who thinks anti-semitism isn’t alive and well today should check out this video clip of a Jewish comedian playing an anti-semitic song at a bar…
See? Funny and interesting and a scary look at our country. It’s something well worth seeing that would have never come up if you had just asked the bar patron “do you hate Jews?”
Right. “Fake but accurate.” 
Well, it was a story that anti-Muslim sentiment was on the rise. That was established. They followed up with a hidden camera, as a way of demonstrating this. The NASCAR crowd didn’t behave the way the study in the prior news story predicted. If they go to other venues (and apparently they have), then I don’t see what the problem is. Will they run the story? I remember The Onion’s retrospective of the 20th century. In the 1950s, one of the headlines was, IIRC, “Everything Nifty.” That’s not really news, you know.
The recent Daily Show that had a man-in-the-street segment where people were asked “What’s the one race America can do without?” might be a better example of that.
Some people obviously recognized the jokey nature of the question and responded in kind, but there were definitely people who were answering in earnest, too.
Really. Isn’t this undercover kind of stunt par for the course in journalism?
Those who say that this was “creating the news, not reporting it”, do you feel that way about all investigative journalism? If not, what was it about this was different from other instances of investigative journalism?
An investigative journalist would, um, ‘investigate’ reports that folks at NASCAR events were beating up Arabs. He or she might even take along a hidden camera to get actual footage of such activity.
What an investigative journalist does not do is bring along ‘plants’ and simply hope that someone gets beaten up. Look at it this way: unsanitary conditions at a local restaurant? That’s certainly fair game and worth a hidden camera or two. But you don’t bring along some insect eggs, secretly stick them into some batter and then watch it be served and then think you’ve nailed 'em! In other words, there is a huge difference between “Let’s see if they’re serving insect larva in their food” and “Let’s put insect larva in their food and see if they’ll serve it.”
It would only be analagous to putting insect larva in food if Dateline had also hired goons to do actual harrassment. The “insect larva”/“harrassment” never actually occurred. What they were looking for was not there.
A better analogy would be, “We hear Senator Schmuck is taking bribes. Let’s go offer him one, and see if he takes it.”
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Really? So you’re saying that at crowded, open public events it is common to have people, say, yell racist insults? Bullshit.
I certainly heard plenty of anti-gay epithets shouted (although not so much with the racism, since it’s not as socially acceptable to be racist as it is a homophobe) when I used to watch wrestling on TV, and televised wrestling matches are certainly crowded, open public events. So it’s not like bigotry never rears it ugly head at such events.
Well, it’s not that they’re all really polite at NASCAR races. I’ve been to a couple of them. Before the race, when the drivers were being paraded around in convertibles, at least 20 people in my section screamed FU at Jeff Gordon when he came by. If the seeming Muslims didn’t get a rise out of them, perhaps the fans didn’t hate Muslims as much as they hate Jeff Gordon. Maybe if the “Muslims” had been wearing number 24…