MGJR Volume 2 2014 | Page 19

Vieques landed him 90 days of solitude in a federal lockup in 2001 and before a run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2004. Sharpton began to smooth some of the rough edges and to expand his world view under the tutelage of such prominent scholars as Cornel West, then at Princeton, and Charles Ogletree of Harvard. He began to brand himself as a human rights activist capable of embracing more than typical issues facing blacks in the United States. He began to talk of gay rights and immigration. In a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl in 2011, Sharpton described himself as “a refined agitator.”

“I think a lot of people are stuck in time,” he told Stahl. “Thankfully, I’m not.”

That’s the Sharpton hired by MSNBC at a time of blurred lines, especially on the cable networks, between what journalists do and what advocates do, between journalism that aspires to nonpartisanship and the outright take-no-prisoners approach of hired guns. Reviewing his show shortly after its debut in August 2011, Alessandra Stanley, a New York Times media observer, concluded that Sharpton fit right in because “in a cable universe in which former Gov. Eliot Spitzer can get his own cable show (however briefly) some two years after having to leave office because he hired prostitutes, it’s hard to quibble over Mr. Sharpton’s reputation 20 years ago. And in the evening at least, MSNBC is less a news provider than a carousel of liberal opinion – potential conflicts of interest are swept aside in a swirl of excitable guests.”

The blame for this blurring lies with the cable networks’ by-any-means-necessary audience development strategies, according to analysts such as Eric Deggans, the media critic for National Public Radio who began commenting on what he sees as an alarming development several years ago, when he held a similar post at the Tampa Bay Times.

“They are taking people who have conflicts of interest, they are taking people who are activists, and they are making them look like independent, objective journalists in the way they dress, in the way they present stories, in

their attitude on camera,” Deggans, the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), said in an interview.

“And then what happens is that, as people start to realize that they’re not independent and that they do have conflicts of interest and that they do have an agenda that

they sometimes disclose to viewers and sometimes they don’t, it slowly starts to erode people’s faith in the journalists that are independent. It makes it harder for the people who are independent – who wear the same suits, who stand on the same sets and have the same graphics

over their left or right shoulder – to convince the audience that they are presenting an objective presentation, as opposed to an Al Sharpton or Stephanie Cutter [CNN] or Karl Rove [Fox News], who is presenting the news from a different perspective.”

Critics were especially vocal during the Trayon Martin-George Zimmerman case. Zimmerman, a neighborhood patrol volunteer, suspected Martin, an unarmed teenager, was up to no good, confronted him, engaged in a fight and shot him to death in 2012. Sharpton’s advocacy on behalf of Martin’s family – on Politics Nation and other NBC shows, in the streets with marching protesters and in negotiations with the Obama Justice Department and others in law enforcement – led to a widely-covered prosecution, trial and acquittal last year. On one fairly typical day, July 17, The Washington Post noted, Sharpton “played several parts in the Martin story

19

The Godfather of Soul, musician James Brown, was also a godfather and mentor to the young Al Sharpton..

Photo courtesy of Madamenoire.com.