MGJR Volume 2 2014 | Page 20

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virtually at once: national TV host, Martin-family advocate, rally organizer and promoter, and newsmaker.”

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC who hired Sharpton, was not available for an interview for this article. However, he has in the past defended his decision. He told The Washington Post last year: “We didn’t hire him to be just another news host. I knew who we were hiring. He brings to our channel a different voice, and a voice who speaks about issues that are not being talked about regularly anywhere else. . . . I think having Rev. Sharpton on our air is a major plus for this network.”

The Powerbroker

Sharpton’s contract exempts him from NBC News policies on political participation by employees, and Griffin insists that the network is transparent about Sharpton’s involvements. That has not quieted criticism, often from the Fox News camp, that Sharpton is permitted to be political in ways that other pundits are not because he supported the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. Comcast has denied that; so has Sharpton. “They are grasping at straws,” he says.

Sharpton lobbied on behalf of Comcast as it sought to acquire NBC Universal as far back as 2010. He is proud that his National Action Network, the NAACP and the National Urban League negotiated a memorandum of

understanding, filed with the FCC as part of the merger

deal, requiring Comcast to expand opportunities for minorities, including ownership of networks and

participation on advisory boards. All three civil rights organizations hold seats on the Comcast advisory board – as they also do at Fox News’s parent company, News Corp. So Sharpton is miffed at partisan critics, as well as at black journalists who initially asserted that if MSNBC wanted to diversify its on-air talent pool, it should hire an authentic journalist, not an activist.

“We negotiated and got the largest concession of a media corporation probably in history and certainly the largest we’ve seen in decades,” he says. “They ought to be praising me rather than worrying about one show. You haven’t seen, since the heyday of [Jesse Jackson’s] PUSH 30 years ago, a civil rights group get that – and they’re so busy worrying about their careers that they never even dealt with that.”

Sean (“Diddy”) Combs, for one, is grateful. Combs, who calls Sharpton “Pops,” began discussing media ownership with him as far back as 2005, when they shared a cross-country flight on a Pepsi corporate jet following the Los Angeles funeral of Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer best known for winning an acquittal for O. J. Simpson in the so-called “trial of the century” in 1995. Cochran, like Sharpton, had been a member of a Pepsi’s minority advisory board. “These conversations with Diddy paid off a few years ago, when the activist community got commitments from NBC, General Electric, and Comcast to make investments in the black and Latino communities as they were trying to get governmental approval for a merger,” Sharpton wrote in The Rejected Stone, never making explicit that he was part of that “activist community.” Combs launched Revolt TV, a music channel, in October. Another beneficiary of the deal, Earvin (“Magic”) Johnson, launched Aspire in 2012, promising “a network that encourages and challenges African-Americans to reach for their dreams and will appeal to all generations.”

From a Little Light Shining to the Spotlight

Sharpton, who draws a line of succession from King to Jackson to himself, leverages his civil rights work into the kind of lucrative career Martin Luther King Jr. did not live long enough to consider and that surpasses Jackson’s. But resistance to Sharpton as heir is visceral for myriad reasons.

Sharpton is not the polished theologian with a Ph.D. in the mold of King; nor was he chosen to represent a civil rights cause the way a 26-year-old King was in 1955. Back then, after Rosa Parks’s singular act of courage in refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus, the Montgomery Improvement Associstion chose

Al Sharpton launched the National Action Network to take civil rights advocacy beyond the borders of New York.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.org.