MSNBC'S Sharpton Sinkhole

A few nights back, Mark Levin made a powerful point on his radio show: Fox News boss Roger Ailes is a well-known and infamous name in media circles, like some sort of cable-news Voldemort or Darth Vader. Meanwhile, MSNBC boss -- quick, can you name him? -- Phil Griffin is unknown and not the least bit controversial after hiring, as Levin unforgettably put it, a "conga line of morons."

NBC news used to be the channel for sober, boring Huntley-Brinkley journalism. It was liberal, to be sure but serious. NBC's news wasn't always objective, but it had a reputation for professionalism. Think Tim Russert. But in today's era, Brian Williams going on saucer-eyed burger runs with President Obama is a refreshing improvement over MSNBC's lineup, chock-full of vicious, uncivil, shamelessly partisan left-wing hacks.

Griffin is the man who should be held responsible for this. This man fired Pat Buchanan because he didn't think his latest book "should be a part of the national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC." Buchanan worried in print about a possible "end of white America." But Griffin hired and now promotes the race-huckstering activist the Rev. Al Sharpton.

By giving Sharpton a platform and showing Buchanan the door, Griffin is engaging in mind-boggling hypocrisy -- duplicity unbecoming of a "news" network executive, unless he works for MSNBC.

Before Buchanan was thrown out, the blog Inside Cable News -- no conservative hot spot -- decried "The Sharpton Sized Elephant in MSNBC's Buchanan Room." The blogger saw danger around the corner: "MSNBC is all but inviting the same litmus test to be applied to Sharpton. And Sharpton would fail that test just as Buchanan apparently has."

Before his hiring, Sharpton was infamous for perpetuating a hateful racist hoax in 1987 starring a teenaged Tawana Brawley, who smeared dung and wrote racial epithets on herself and then falsely accused a pack of white men of repeatedly raping and sodomizing her. In 1991 and again in 1995, Sharpton was ranting at the center of racial protests -- filled with blacks shrieking anti-Semitic insults -- that wrapped up with funerals. But this didn't stop Sharpton from running for president in 2004, with placid calm in the liberal media seas.

Since Obama was elected, Sharpton lost a bunch of weight, then underwent a different sort of makeover -- a PR scrub by the national media, honored as "reinvented" in a fawning Newsweek cover story and boosted by Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" as "now, a trusted White House adviser who's become the president's go-to black leader." Does anyone believe the "trusted White House adviser" thing had nothing to do with these gooey stories or Sharpton's new job last summer at MSNBC?

Sharpton not only anchors a TV show, but with MSNBC's permission he moonlights as an activist as well, leading his marches and crusades. A few days ago, NBC's "Today" brought on Sharpton to condemn Rush Limbaugh for being "offensive and misogynist," with co-host Amy Robach wondering: "Is this something the Republican Party needs to deal with right now?" Like a good company servant, Robach had nothing to say about whether Sharpton is a judge of anyone else's moral integrity or political appeal.

While MSNBC unloads both barrels on Rush Limbaugh for "vicious attacks" and lobbies for his show's complete implosion, they continue to employ Sharpton and Ed Schultz, who advocated on-air for ripping Dick Cheney's heart out of his chest and calls Joe Lieberman's wife a "whore." The idea that MSNBC can lecture anyone else for being an uncivil cesspool is beyond ridiculous. It's just sick.

But then, MSNBC is very talented at denial. Rachel Maddow also entered beyond-laughable territory when she granted an interview to Slate at the end of 2011 and claimed "there may be liberals on TV at MSNBC, but the network is not operating with a political objective."

There is no party line to toe at MSNBC, she insisted, just a herd of independent minds. Maddow continued, with a straight face: "Whereas Fox is operating with a political objective to elect Republican candidates, and particularly, to elect Republican candidates Roger Ailes likes. I think Roger Ailes is a really good TV executive, but their operation is essentially a political operation to elect Republicans."

Comcast now owns NBC and MSNBC -- thanks to a merger approved by the Obama Justice Department. Comcast was aided by the activism of one Al Sharpton, so perhaps his program was part of the deal. Comcast executives and employees have also shoveled millions of dollars to Obama's re-election campaign. The definition "essentially a political operation to elect Democrats" has never been more accurate.

Sharpton is nothing more than a loud-mouthed, hate-filled, leftist, gimme-gimme a**hole who happens to be black (in case you’ve forgotten).....so of course he’s untouchable.

A conservative, Republican or Caucasian who behaves like Sharpton would have already been fired from the network he worked for and asked to a Beer Summit to be told how stupidly he acted.

Brent is always perceptive in his quest for pointing out bias. He has however missed the mark in this piece and misunderstands MSNBC

The cable channel is the voice of the Democrat party and is owned and controlled by that group. Mr Griffin makes no decisions, he is merely the puppet, the instrument of his superiors who tell him what to do, who to hire and programming to be developed.

Not owned you say, well perhaps there is no bill of sale. MSNBC is a clever inkind campaign contribution masquerading as a cable channel owned once by NBC and GE and now by Comcast.

The propaganda emanating from the MSNBC instrument is directed from the DNC. The DNC propaganda office, in the best Goebbel’s tradition is the single source of all propaganda and parcels it out to the various instruments of which MSNBC is but one. ......... a weak one.

Sharpton should be in jail BUT the gub mint needs boogie men out there to infuriate those of us with morals, courage and ethics.
Twana Brawley?
Tax evasion?
Race baiting?

In a just world, he’d be sorting laundry in a prison basement.

Thank you, RightOnline, for saying it both very well and succinctly. When the history of our times is written, people are going to ask one another, "How in the world could they have been so deliberately blind?

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