Is Al Sharpton Damaged Goods?

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

So Sharpton has had his show on MSNBC for several months now. I've never actually seen the show. I've hardly been watching any TV for a few months now.

However, Sharpton has been called a race hustler, a shakedown artist (or maybe that's referring only to Jesse Jackson) by conservatives. Are they right? Is Sharpton too ethically/morally compromised to be worthy of his own TV show on MSNBC?

I only know the vague details of the Tawana Brawley incident/hoax/farce.

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

I believe that Sharpton is worse than damaged goods. He has no class and is dirty. Here's a story from Slate (I believe a left-leaning magazine) in 2004. I'm going to highlight a key part of the case:

slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ballot_box/2003/09/the_worst_of_al_sharpton.html

Slate continues its short features on the 2004 presidential candidates. Previous series covered the candidates' biographies, buzzwords, agendas, worldviews, and claims to fame. This series assesses the story that supposedly shows each candidate at his worst. Here's the one told by critics of Al Sharpton—and what they leave out.

Charge: In 1987, a 15-year-old black girl named Tawana Brawley went missing and was found four days later covered in dog feces and with racial slurs written on her body. She claimed that at least two and possibly six white men, one of them carrying a badge, had repeatedly raped her in the woods in upstate New York. Sharpton took up Brawley's cause and defended her refusal to cooperate with prosecutors, saying that asking her to meet with New York's attorney general (who had been asked by Gov. Mario Cuomo to supervise the investigation) would be like "asking someone who watched someone killed in the gas chamber to sit down with Mr. Hitler." According to the Associated Press, Sharpton and Brawley's lawyers asserted "on 33 separate occasions" that a local prosecutor named Steven Pagones "had kidnapped, abused and raped" Brawley. There was no evidence, and Pagones was soon cleared. Sharpton then accused a local police cult with ties to the Irish Republican Army of perpetrating the alleged assault. The case fizzled when a security guard for Brawley's lawyers testified that the lawyers and Sharpton knew Brawley was lying. A grand jury investigation concluded in late 1988 that Brawley "was not the victim of forcible sexual assault" and that the whole thing was a hoax. The report specifically exonerated Pagones, and in 1998 Pagones won a defamation lawsuit against Sharpton, Brawley, and Brawley's lawyers. Sharpton was ordered to pay Pagones $65,000. Johnnie Cochran and other Sharpton benefactors subsidized the payment.

Defense: Sharpton stands by Brawley's story. In May 2002, when the Associated Press asked whether he would apologize to Pagones, Sharpton replied: "Apologize for what? For believing a young lady?" Referring to his incipient presidential campaign, Sharpton continued, "When people around the country know that I stood up for a young lady ... I think it will help me." In March 2003, when the Washington Post asked whether Sharpton could have expressed sympathy for Pagones after the prosecutor was cleared, Sharpton replied that Brawley "identified Pagones. I was her spokesperson. I cannot turn around in what I said I believed." As to the jury verdict against him, Sharpton told the New York Daily News in July 2003 that "a jury said in the Central Park jogging case … that I was wrong, and it was just overturned 13 years later. Juries can be wrong. I've stood by what I believe. Juries are proven wrong every day."


Sharpton takes a big hit for:

* Being a conspiracy theorist
* Comparing the Attorney General of New York to "Mr. Hitler" with zero evidence
* Asserting major criminal acts to be true about the local attorney general on the bases of "no evidence"

For those reasons, Sharpton should be considered as someone along the lines of Michelle Bachmann, who is a serial liar. He should not have his own show and his running in the primary in 2004 and should have been fought more bitterly and every attempt to stop him by black folks should have been made.

[W.E.B. Du Bois]

I nominate Pulitzer Prize-winning, Washington Post writer, frequent MSNBC host and African-American Eugene Robinson as someone who MSNBC SHOULD have hired instead of Sharpton.

Even Captain Obvious Jonathon Capeheart (also black) would be better than Sharpton.

There's another black liberal guy who works for the NYT who I've seen on Meet the Press. They could have gone to him too.

Or they could have grabbed Rowland Martin or that racially mixed chick who substituted for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on occasion. There's probably a lot of black radio hosts they could have picked up.

I wonder if MSNBC just didn't give a shit and they just applied the Ed Schultz standard: just get someone who has credibility with the liberal base and the hell with if he has class or not.