Al Sharpton’s new pulpit
Sharpton's rise at MSNBC is part of what appears to be a reinvention underway at the Peacock's Fledgling Network. After years of doubling down on guessing at the prevailing political winds from Washington, the network has lately been stepping out on true faith and burnishing its progressive bona fides. The hiring of ardent lefties Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell as prime-time anchors and MSNBC's ongoing variations with the daytime lineup, suggest a network in flux — the better to be in play in the runup to a no-doubt tumultuous presidential election.
The 6 o'clock hour is perfect for Sharpton right now. Technically, 6 p.m. isn't prime-time, and that's a good thing. Count on the good folks at MSNBC to quietly polish and sharpen Sharpton's on-air demeanor. As it stands now, Sharpton's too willing to jump bad, to talk at people instead of to or with him, to conversationally get in someone's face in a way that doesn't work with the relative niceties of mainstream television. Never let it be said that Al Sharpton ever brought Roberts' Rules of Order to a rhetorical gunfight; anyone who watched him during the long battle over Tawana Brawley knows better than that.
“If he can ever become comfortable on-camera and expand his horizons, Sharpton may eventually bring to MSNBC the combination of intellect and passion that has made so many of his press conferences over the years little wonders of argument, controversy, hype, entertainment, and enlightenment. Whether he’ll ever reach that point on PoliticsNation remains to be seen. Or, depending on the ratings, not seen at all.”
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It's a long way from the Rev's adidas track-suit wearing days. As the head of the New York City-based National Action Network, Sharpton has for years navigated the free-fire zones of politics, culture and the media like nobody else. Sharpton, who began his life in the church as a Pentecostal minister at an early age, moved toward a more aggressive social activism in the mid 80’s, when New York City was its own free-fire zone for African Americans, frequently victimized by the city’s police department in tragic and sometimes criminal circumstances. Sharpton frequently represented the families involved in press conferences and interviews, appearing to stand on their behalf as a moral witness with a sense of the street.
The fiery storefront rhetoric that Sharpton all but trademarked had its potential for blowback. In 1987, Sharpton championed the case of Tawana Brawley, a teenager who claimed to have been raped by one Steven Pagones, an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County.
Sharpton took Brawley under his wing and engaged in a public campaign of what amounted to defamation of Pagones’ character. When Brawley was found by a grand jury to have lied about the whole thing, Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation by Pagones. Sharpton was hit with a $65,000 judgment, ultimately paid by his supporters.
Since then, to one degree or another, Sharpton’s been about the process of not so much rebuilding his image as refining it to suit the dictates of a new, immersive media age. MSNBC’s announcement confirms his success in doing exactly that.
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Not a fill-in host, not a newsreader of the evening news, as someone whose function is necessarily more transcriptive than opinionated. Sharpton becomes one of the regular five-days-a-week voices in the commentary realm of the mediasphere — the first to assume that level of saturation equal to the rest of American electronic media. Roland Martin had a similar gig at CNN, on Saturdays, for about two months in 2009, filling in for a host on maternity leave. Juan Williams has a spot as a commentator at Fox News — with a three-year, $2 million deal, he’s the highest-paid substitute host on TV — but no show of his own, no consistent self-branded platform from which to espouse the conservative line from a black perspective.
Sharpton has the bully pulpit right now. Implicit in his promotion at MSNBC is the network’s acceptance of what makes Sharpton’s new job bigger than Sharpton: The opinions of black Americans on current national and global events are as important as those of anyone else.
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The big question is, what’s next at MSNBC and what’s next at the rest of the cable outlets?
It would be easy to be that cynical if there weren’t evidence of something more going on at MSNBC, something foundational and apparently organic. We’re not talking a Paradigm Shift, but MSNBC, along with other cable nets and the broadcast networks, has been moving away from the persistent media meme of on-air correspondents and anchors as a collection of Multiple White Wise Men.
Author and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson has been a guest host for Ed Schultz of “The Ed Show,” while Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post substituted for veteran interviewer Martin Bashir recently, taking the reins of the “Martin Bashir” program.
Meanwhile, author and Columbia University professor Melissa Harris-Perry, a frequent fixture on the network, has been pinch-hitting this week for Rachel Maddow, guest-hosting “The Rachel Maddow Show” and by most accounts doing it rather well.
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It all seems to indicate a network increasingly comfortable with doing under its own brand what a cable news network needs to do today to fully establish an identity: take risks, step outside the box.
They’ve done this before. Between 9/11 and now, MSNBC has frequently shuttled show hosts, and corporate identities, on and off the air in an outwardly feverish attempt to gauge the national post-9/11 mood and establish a more formidable presence in a cable space historically defined by CNN.
What’s different this time is the colors of the people in front of those cameras. Sharpton will be the highest-profile example of MSNBC’s apparent embrace of on-air diversity of message and messenger, reflecting a more demographically pragmatic world view.
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That happens less frequently these days. But in ways they may not be prepared to admit, Sharpton’s rise at MSNBC raises the stakes on setting the high ground for enunciating the African American viewpoint. Not that there should be just one source for that — certainly not. But in a society smitten with the name brand, the A-list identity, black news networks may well be inclined to revisit who’s at the helm of their news broadcasts and their relationship with black viewers.
For years now, African American cable viewers have favored MSNBC’s news coverage over other cable outlets, including BET and TV One, which would be presumed to have some intrinsic advantage over the others. In July 2010, The New York Times, citing data from Nielsen Media Research, reported that MSNBC has averaged 145,000 black viewer households, representing 19.3 percent of its total viewer audience of 751,000 households.
Earlier this year, Richard Prince’s Journal-Isms news blog reported that “[i]n prime time, MSNBC beat CNN and Fox News Channel among African Americans and Hispanics, according to ratings for the first quarter of the year.” MSNBC’s ratings among black viewers climbed to 171,000. That ratings-driven preference no doubt played a role in MSNBC making the decision to hire Sharpton in the first place. For black networks, that fact shouldn’t be overlooked.
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Last 7 Rows at Entertainment Weekly: “Sharpton is an unintelligible, racist hack that would look far more natural barking at passersby outside of an old 42nd Street sleaze joint. He is a disgusting embarrassment that should have been shamed into infamy’s black hole long ago.”
Ash at Entertanment Weekly: “Sharpton is not even intelligent opinion. He can’t even read a Teleprompter right.”
1will, The Huffington Post: “He'll be around for a while until MSNBC gets tired of the ratings decline. He'll most likely stick around through 2012 and scream racism nightly until after Obama is voted out of office. I suspect he'll get the boot in 2013.”
Pab08, Huff Post: “Sharpton will fail. Not because he is black, but because he is obnoxious.”
Matt Spedale, HuffPost: “What is the over under on this guy's hosting job lasting a full month?”
For better or worse, Al Sharpton has become a regular part of the rotating face of the Lean Forward Network. The challenge for him is to distill and articulate the national conversation without reliably becoming part of it. The challenge for the media generally, and the rest of us, is to realize just how diverse that conversation has always been.
Image credits: Sharpton images, PoliticsNation logo, MSNBC logo, Harris-Perry: MSNBC. Sharpton and Tawana Brawley, 1988: Associated Press. BET logo: © 2012 Black Entertainment Television/Viacom.
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