A lengthy new Washington Post profile on the Rev. Al Sharpton looks at the MSNBC host’s standing as a civil rights leader and but treads very lightly around some of the less flattering details of Sharpton’s past.
The 5,800-word piece, which took the center spot above the fold on the front page of Sunday’s paper, refers to “doubts” and questions about the longtime community activist, but these doubts refer to Sharpton’s own inner turmoil over whether he has had a substantial enough impact on the standing of minorities in the U.S.
The piece only briefly touches on Sharpton’s multimillion-dollar tax troubles, his lead role in the Tawana Brawley hoax in the 1980s, and his statements during 1995 demonstrations at Freddie’s Fashion Mart in Harlem — omitting entirely that the Freddie’s agitation ended when a protestor murdered seven people in the store and burned it down.
“The goal of the story,” Eli Saslow, the Washington Post reporter who authored the story, told the Washington Examiner, “was not to do a full recounting of the controversial life and career of Al Sharpton — a story that has been well covered, in the Post and elsewhere — but to write about Sharpton in this moment.”
The Brawley incident is mentioned in one paragraph, with the explanation that Sharpton “had been so intent on finding a righteous cause during those early years that he had sometimes acted as the agitator.”
But while Saslow refers to the racially-tinged and borderline-anti-Semitic language Sharpton used during the Freddy’s Fashion Mart episode, there is no context for the comments and the deadly rampage that punctuated that protest is left out. The violence followed protests by Sharpton and other black activists who complained that a Jewish business owner wanted to move into a store space occupied by a black business owner.
In an audio recording three months prior to the massacre, Sharpton is reportedly heard saying, “I want to make it clear to the radio and audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.”
Though Saslow’s story on Sharpton mentions that the MSNBC host is viewed by many as “an opportunist who would do whatever was necessary to assemble a crowd,” it goes on to paint a portrait of personal growth and high achievement, noting accurately that Sharpton now logs “a dozen visits each year to the White House” and has become an informal adviser to President Obama.
“He took up meditation. He began writing a column for the Huffington Post,” the profile said. “He built up his National Action Network by soliciting corporate donations from companies such as Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch and Macy’s, raising $5 million a year. He decided he needed to connect better with white audiences and studied Bill Clinton and Jerry Falwell. He and the National Action Network began paying down hundreds of thousands of dollars in overdue taxes. He organized marches not just for racial justice but also for gay rights, the environment and undocumented immigrants.”
Sharpton and his nonprofit National Action Network are in the midst of paying back taxes to the federal government. However, he continues to owe not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but nearly $5 million. Sharpton says he is in the process of negotiating a lower penalty.
Self-reflective quotes from Sharpton — “Have I been too caught up with satisfying my own vanity? My ego?” — are sprinkled throughout Saslow’s piece, which continued over three jump pages in the Post’s Sunday print edition.
But some readers charged that it glossed over Sharpton’s murkier side.
Conservative writer Jay Caruso called the feature a “puff piece” on Twitter.
Another commenter said the Post published “a small book about fatally fraudulent tax cheat Al Sharpton without calling him such.”
After the story published, the Post published a followup item that covered mostly negative reaction from black activists on Twitter but reiterated the profile’s central theme that “Sharpton’s harshest critic might [be] the reverend himself.”
“As the story says, whether by ascension or by default, [Sharpton] is the preeminent civil rights figure in the country right now, at a time when civil rights issues are constantly in the news,” said Saslow. “The story was not trying to examine whether or not he should be the preeminent civil rights leader, because, for better or worse, he already is.”
