Fairness and NASCAR 'coverage'

In the media center at Lowe's Motor speedway last week there were still some sore tails and tight jaws over the previous week's NASCAR sit-down with "selected" members of the motorsports media.

While I understand how frustrating the episode was for the media folks who weren't selected and who got beat on the stories, I'm still a bit puzzled by some of the reactions.

To sum it up, the NASCAR brass, including head man Brian France, made their picks from the crop of reporters and others in the media center on Friday at Kansas Speedway. Then they pulled that small group together and gave them some pretty good "scoops" on Saturday. One heapin' helpin' was France's exclamation that NASCAR might eventually cap the number of teams one owner is allowed to run in NASCAR's premier series, Nextel Cup.

The media representatives not invited to the private party howled then and some of them haven't stopped yet. And it surprises me to see the surprise. Have they not been working NASCAR races and events all this time? And have they not seen this movie before?

A side note and explanation for choosing "working" instead of "covering" here: More accurately, reporters in all forms of the media ply a trade that involves their writing occasional stories, doing sound bites, taping segments and so on. Cover implies a whole lot more.

The most conscientious beat writer ever assigned to City Hall or the White House, for instance, does the same, no more or no less. He or she goes to meetings, works sources, reads news releases and often does as much else as is humanly possible, then writes or otherwise reports about City Hall or the White House.

To say that any equally conscientious beat writer "covers" stock car racing is at least as far from the truth as the distance from a track's media center to the NASCAR hauler. Many of them do a helluva job, but they don't - by any stretch of the imagination, even their own - have the beat "covered."

Bookies cover bets. And reporters might cover a bet from time to time, too, but those who would tell you they have NASCAR covered are just as likely to break a story about restrictor plates at Lowe's Motor Speedway as they are to have anything else "covered." And that might present another problem when the weather turns a little cooler this fall.

I believe that "working" vs. "covering" definition fits the folks who were let in on NASCAR's little secrets at Kansas as much as it does those left in the dark of the media center that Saturday.

Let's try and remember that NASCAR, even with the word "National" as part of its name, is a private business. It is not a governmental agency and certainly not a benevolent one.

Governments in these United States are held somewhat more accountable, by law, than businesses when it comes to dealings with the media and the public. So NASCAR did nothing to run afoul of any law by snubbing some reporters and favoring others.

Businesses, and governments, do that all the time.

What we had in Kansas was, at most, an ethical lapse. It wasn't "fair." And why does that surprise anyone in that battle-hardened group that works the NASCAR beat?