Al Sharpton has certainly become one of the media's sacred cows of late, so much so that when bad news crosses his path, America is unlikely to hear about it.
Take for example a rather embarrassing incident that happened to the former Democrat presidential candidate on Friday which went almost completely ignored by journalists from coast to coast.
As Fox4KC.com reported, Sharpton's National Action Network organized a rally in Washington, D.C., Saturday to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.
Unfortunately, things didn't go so smoothly (video embedded right, available here if embed doesn't work):
More than 100 parents and students in Kansas City were planning to head to Washington D.C. Friday to join in a rally for education. But, instead they were left standing around waiting for buses that never came.
Now, Rev. Al Sharpton said he is suspending the Kansas City leaders until they find out who "dropped the ball." [...]Friday morning more than 100 students lined up at Arrowhead Middle School. Some parents people took off work, packed a lunch and gathered as well. They all waited at 6 a.m. for their bus to arrive. But, after several hours of sitting in a gym with luggage at their feat. It never did.
Can you imagine the media frenzy this would have caused if the same thing happened to folks waiting for buses to bring them to one of last month's Tea Parties?
MSNBC probably would have devoted a whole day's coverage to the mistake including vitriolic comments by Janeane Garofalo.
Yet, according to Google and LexisNexis searches, with the exception of two brief mentions by CNN Saturday, newsrooms couldn't care less.
This followed similar bias by omission when it was announced in April that Sharpton was fined $285,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating a number of laws during his 2004 presidential campaign.
Google and LexisNexis searches found little print coverage of that announcement, and absolutely no television reports.
Clearly, bad news being ignored by the press certainly has to help one's image, especially for someone that wasn't always such a media darling.
As the National Legal and Policy Center reported this month:
His image refurbishment campaign, by any reasonable measure, has been a success. During the Eighties and much of the Nineties, he was the enfant terrible of the civil-rights movement, a public-relations agent’s nightmare. But he’s evolved into a media celebrity.
Apparently so, for now it seems only good news is reported about the former enfant terrible.
Must be nice.
