Talk about a journalistic double standard!!

When NASCAR Hall of Fame driver Richard Petty was asked if Danica Patrick would ever win in the Sprint Cup series he responded honestly.

“If everybody else stayed home,” Petty told reporters at the Canadian Motorsports Expo. “If she’d have been a male, nobody would ever know if she’d showed up at a racetrack.

“This is a female deal that’s driving her. There’s nothing wrong with that, because that’s good PR for me…”

One would expect that after such a candid assessment of Patrick journalists would immediately ask her to respond to the charge.

After all, journalists are supposed to get both side of the story. Since Patrick has never found a microphone or camera she didn’t like it should not be difficult to get her response.

But that never happened.

In literally thousands of stories not one reporter from USA Today or any other major media outlet even asked Patrick to respond.

Instead, many began acting like they were her paid PR staffers/defenders.

ESPN simply mentioned that Petty’s son had said basically the same thing last year and used quotes from that story (LINK). Sports Illustrated used the same lazy tactic.

Matt Myftiu of Yahoo! Sports never spoke to Patrick, but wrote an entire column defending her and saying Petty was being sexist and something out of the 50′s.

“To dismiss Danica as someone who is simply marketable is ridiculous, wrote Myftiu, who failed to note that Patrick is on one of the top NASCAR teams and often is a leading qualifier. ”Sure, she’s not great, but she has good days and bad days, and at restrictor-plate tracks she regularly runs up front. Will she ever win on a non-plate track? Probably not, though short tracks like Martinsville would be her best shot.”

In other words, she probably won’t win any races as Petty said, but Petty shouldn’t have said it.

Ironically, it was a female reporter, Cindy Boren of the Washington Post, who candidly assessed the situation with Patrick.

“Patrick has traded on her looks, particularly in provocative GoDaddy ads, but has not had much success behind the wheel,” notes Boren. “In her first full season in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series last year, she won the pole for the Daytona 500 and finished eighth, but didn’t have another top 10 finish.

“She has won only one major series race, the 2008 Indy Japan 300, during her IndyCar racing days. As a rookie in 2005, she finished fourth in the Indianapolis 500 — the best finish ever for a woman.”