practically given a gold-plated free pass to New York’s premier racial agitator, Al Sharpton.
No matter what his sins against the civic fabric—Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, the Harlem Massacre at Freddy’s Department Store—Sharpton has been rehabilitated on a regular basis. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1993, the Times Magazine ran a cover story called “The Reformation of a Street Preacher.” Omitting his more incendiary remarks during the 1991 Crown Heights riots and his controversial actions at other racially fraught moments, the magazine said that Sharpton was now “softer, more focused, more intellectually polished.” His comments about “white interlopers” had certainly raised the rabble in the 1995 Harlem Massacre, which culminated when a black militant set fire to a Jewish-owned department store next to a black-owned record business that was losing its lease, after which he shot a number of the department store’s employees, resulting in seven deaths in addition to that of the gunman, who took his own life. But the Times threw another life preserver to Sharpton, who was “Buoyant in a Storm” according to a report by Charisse Jones. Ignoring the damning evidence of his role in the massacre, Jones said that Sharpton was playing the role of “consoler, conciliator and political jouster.” She even let Sharpton claim the victim’s mantle: “In my life I’ve had to walk alone sometimes.... I’ve been lied on, I’ve been talked about, mistreated, stabbed and indicted. But through it all, I’ve learned to trust in Jesus. I’ve learned to trust in God. It’s only a test.”
More recently, in 2008, Sharpton attached the loaded term “greedy” to Anthony Weiner, a New York City councilman (now a U.S. congressman) who is Jewish. The slur elicited no response from any Times columnists or its editorial board. As the urban
historian Fred Siegel observed in the wake of the Harlem Massacre, “After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he’s really reformed.” And the Times —along with other media—effaces the facts of Sharpton’s role from the public record “Stalinist-style,” stuffing them down a “memory hole.”
It’s one thing for the Times’ double standards to throw a lifeline to a race hustler like Al Sharpton, allowing him to secure respectability as a national civil rights leader despite an ongoing record of racial arson. Yet it was something else when the Times became a pep squad for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. When John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, said during the campaign that the Times was “completely, totally, 150% in the tank” for Obama, he was dismissed as a biased observer. But the charge itself sticks. Mark Halperin, a straight shooter from Time magazine, uses the New York Times’ reporting as Exhibit A in making a case that coverage of the 2008 campaign was “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.”
Halperin did not analyze the underlying reasons for that bias, but looking through the Times’ coverage it is absolutely clear that the favoritism is racial. The first and foremost example of favoritism toward Obama in the New York Times was the protective coverage it offered regarding his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama had belonged to Trinity United for nearly two decades, and credited Wright’s sermons as a major factor in bringing him to Christianity. Obama was married there and his two daughters were baptized there too. Wright blessed Obama’s house, and Obama says that one of Wright’s sermons furnished the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope.
In a sermon delivered on the Sunday after September 11, 2001, Wright notoriously told his congregation that the United States had brought on al-Qaeda’s attacks because of its own
No matter what his sins against the civic fabric—Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, the Harlem Massacre at Freddy’s Department Store—Sharpton has been rehabilitated on a regular basis. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1993, the Times Magazine ran a cover story called “The Reformation of a Street Preacher.” Omitting his more incendiary remarks during the 1991 Crown Heights riots and his controversial actions at other racially fraught moments, the magazine said that Sharpton was now “softer, more focused, more intellectually polished.” His comments about “white interlopers” had certainly raised the rabble in the 1995 Harlem Massacre, which culminated when a black militant set fire to a Jewish-owned department store next to a black-owned record business that was losing its lease, after which he shot a number of the department store’s employees, resulting in seven deaths in addition to that of the gunman, who took his own life. But the Times threw another life preserver to Sharpton, who was “Buoyant in a Storm” according to a report by Charisse Jones. Ignoring the damning evidence of his role in the massacre, Jones said that Sharpton was playing the role of “consoler, conciliator and political jouster.” She even let Sharpton claim the victim’s mantle: “In my life I’ve had to walk alone sometimes.... I’ve been lied on, I’ve been talked about, mistreated, stabbed and indicted. But through it all, I’ve learned to trust in Jesus. I’ve learned to trust in God. It’s only a test.”
More recently, in 2008, Sharpton attached the loaded term “greedy” to Anthony Weiner, a New York City councilman (now a U.S. congressman) who is Jewish. The slur elicited no response from any Times columnists or its editorial board. As the urban
historian Fred Siegel observed in the wake of the Harlem Massacre, “After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he’s really reformed.” And the Times —along with other media—effaces the facts of Sharpton’s role from the public record “Stalinist-style,” stuffing them down a “memory hole.”
It’s one thing for the Times’ double standards to throw a lifeline to a race hustler like Al Sharpton, allowing him to secure respectability as a national civil rights leader despite an ongoing record of racial arson. Yet it was something else when the Times became a pep squad for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. When John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, said during the campaign that the Times was “completely, totally, 150% in the tank” for Obama, he was dismissed as a biased observer. But the charge itself sticks. Mark Halperin, a straight shooter from Time magazine, uses the New York Times’ reporting as Exhibit A in making a case that coverage of the 2008 campaign was “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.”
Halperin did not analyze the underlying reasons for that bias, but looking through the Times’ coverage it is absolutely clear that the favoritism is racial. The first and foremost example of favoritism toward Obama in the New York Times was the protective coverage it offered regarding his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama had belonged to Trinity United for nearly two decades, and credited Wright’s sermons as a major factor in bringing him to Christianity. Obama was married there and his two daughters were baptized there too. Wright blessed Obama’s house, and Obama says that one of Wright’s sermons furnished the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope.
In a sermon delivered on the Sunday after September 11, 2001, Wright notoriously told his congregation that the United States had brought on al-Qaeda’s attacks because of its own
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