INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The truth about the race

There are some things on which you can depend. And one of them is that every single year, the local news media act as a cheerleader and an apologist for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, giving it a free pass and absolutely no criticism.

Over the past 20 years, the Indy 500 has gone from being a national institution and the topic of water-cooler talk from coast to coast into the third or fourth most interesting thing on network television that day.

And what is the Indy news media reporting? They’re saying that everything is great at the Speedway. They’re praising Tony George for his uncanny ability to ruin the once-revered name of the 500 as the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

The lone dissident voice in local sports, Robin Miller, was railroaded out of a job several years ago and now all local reporters are lockstep in saying what a wonderful event we have in the 500.

The fact remains that, by the Speedway’s own figures, there are 40 million more NASCAR fans than there are Indy Racing League fans. A dozen years of decline in TV ratings may have been reversed this year, but the stock cars have replaced the open-wheel cars in the public’s imagination.

You don’t hear even a whisper about that in our local media. It’s all about full team coverage of meaningless practice sessions, local reporters literally falling over each other to tell us how glamorous Danica Patrick is and how much we are all excited about the race.

It’s hard to figure out why. The Speedway doesn’t really do anything for the local media. It doesn’t advertise much, it doesn’t deliver huge ratings and it doesn’t really engage the community, excepting the subset of the population that enjoys getting sunburned and drunk on Memorial Day weekend.

I think that’s more of the pack mentality, combined with a collective, self-imposed blindness that leads the media to ignore the problems that continue to plague the race.

Nobody wants to be perceived as saying negative things about the race and, by implication, the city that has gauged much of its positive self-image from the perception that the race still matters.

Maybe it’s that the media want to act as a catalyst for the restoration of the track’s glory days, thinking that if they keep telling us how important the race is, it will once again be so.

The national media isn’t fooled. Every year, they come to town and write about the decline and fall of the Indy 500. They even mock our media for ignoring any negative realities.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know anybody who actually cares about the race, at least not since I was about 15 years old. I’m sure diehard IRL fans exist in the city, but I haven’t encountered any of them in years, except the Tony George fans who send me hate mail when I annually point out how weakened the 500 has become.

The only tangible benefit the Indy 500 brings the city, as far as I can see, is the fact that our downtown sidewalks get bleachers installed on them for a few weeks every May in preparation for the parade.

The bleachers allow us to fulfill our destiny as perpetual spectators. Every afternoon last week, they were filled with office workers, homeless people and folks just looking for a place to sit in the springtime sunshine.