Misinformation courtesy of the Washington Post? It does happen! Just last year I fact checked Fact Checker Glenn Kessler for his mis/disinformation regarding the godawful Donald Trump/Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell tax bill rammed through Congress back in 2017, and now I’m on the trail of WashPost columnist Jonathan Capehart for his seriously uncritical take on Al Sharpton, If Sharpton is a ‘Loudmouth,’ Trump is so much worse.
Well, I agree that Donald Trump is light years worse than Reverend Al, but Jonathan’s title sets us up to believe that, based on his viewing of TV documentary on Sharpton, Loudmouth, which I haven’t seen, Jonathan's going to explain to us why Al’s sins, committed when he was on the way up and hungry for fame, though far from negligible, are trivial in comparison to Trump’s, which is certainly true.
But that’s not what we “learn”. Instead, we’re told that early Al—“that” Al—was “bombastic”, sure, but bombastic for truth:
By “that” Sharpton, I mean the bombastic version who preceded the more sophisticated one I have covered and known for the last 29 years. “That” Sharpton is the man who led Black marchers through the White streets of Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 to protest the death of Michael Griffith at the hands of a White mob. He’s the man who did the same in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989, to protest the similar murder of Yusuf Hawkins. Each time, Sharpton and the protesters who joined him were met with the kind of racism once thought to occur only in the South.
Um, what about other “Early Al”, Jonathan? What about the Tawana Brawley fake rape case, in which both Brawley and Sharpton made any number of false charges accusing New York state and local officials of racist and criminal behavior? One of those accused by Sharpton, Steven Pagones, brought suit against Sharpton and several others for defamation, winning a judgment of $345,000 against them. The jury found that Sharpton had made seven defamatory statements about Pagones.
Oh, and what about the Crown Heights affair in 1991, a furiously divisive dispute between members of New York’s black and Jewish populations? When Sharpton said things like “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house,” and tried to link South Africa, then ruled by racist white Afrikaners, to the Jews living in Crown Heights: “Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” This looks like a job for Glenn Kessler!
Afterwords
Of course, WashPost columnists make any number of nonsensical statements every day, but here Capehart pretends that’s he’s going to tell us about Al’s shortcomings, and then pretends they don’t exist!
