New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley has a piece (8/31/11) about Al Sharpton's debut as an MSNBC host. It seems his show, like others on the channel, could use more of a debate:

On Monday Mr. Sharpton followed the patented formula, bringing in two experts who agreed with him that recent efforts in North Carolina and other states to stiffen voter-identity requirements and restrict early voting would mostly affect the minorities and younger voters who turned out in record numbers for Barack Obama in 2008. Mr. Sharpton called it a "poll tax by another name." It’s an interesting issue, and not one that other MSNBC talkshows have addressed with the same degree of passion, but it would also have been helpful to viewers to learn how proponents of voting restrictions justify the legislation.

While diversity of viewpoints is a nice goal, this is one of those issues where the "other side" doesn't have much of a case. Voter ID laws are, in theory, supposed to protect against voter fraud--which is an almost completely nonexistent problem. Stanley's paper has written a couple of  editorials about this, citing the Brennan Center's excellent work on the issue.

There are obviously plenty of things you can say about Al Sharpton or MSNBC. Wishing that his show would feature more guests spewing misinformation is hardly "helpful."

A Drudge Report headline today (4/6/11) represents the tip of the rotten iceberg:

RACE BASE: Obama looks to Rev. Al Sharpton for help in re-election...

Imagine that the executive director of Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network punched a woman in the head while uttering a racial epithet. Imagine further that two years after this hate crime took place, the executive director still had his job, and when Sharpton was asked about this, he speculated about why this story was "even newsworthy," and insisted that "I don't have any day-to-day control over the organization."

Does anyone doubt that if such an incident happened, it would be a major national news story, and Sharpton would be facing a firestorm of criticism?

Yet precisely such an incident did happen--except that the leader of the national movement was former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, and the perpetrator of the assault was Marcus Epstein, the executive director of Tancredo's anti-immigration PAC, Team America.

So why is it that a Google News search for "Marcus Epstein" turns up only a handful of stories--many of them in progressive online outlets like Talking Points Memo, Washington Independent and Daily Kos? The "liberal media" work in mysterious ways, I guess.