You want stink... LOL... hmmmm... maybe the main stream media is racist. Poor al....
Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2003 12:52 p.m. EST
Sharpton: I Want Clinton, Kennedy Scandal Protection
Citing the media's reluctance to confront Senators Hillary
Clinton and Ted Kennedy about scandal skeletons in their
closet, Democratic presidential candidate Rev. Al Sharpton demanded Monday that the press give him the same pass on ethical questions about his past.
"The next time anybody wants to know about Tawana Brawley, I'm going to ask them, 'Do you ask Teddy Kennedy about Chappaquiddick? Do you ask Hillary Clinton about her husband?'" the firebrand reverend complained to Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, while he was preparing for his Martin Luther King Day commemoration.
During an appearance nine days ago on "Meet the Press," host Tim Russert grilled the Harlem-based presidential candidate relentlessly on the 1986 Tawana Brawley rape imbroglio. But the NBC Washington bureau chief, who has interviewed Sen. Clinton on several occasions, has yet to question her about a still-outstanding rape allegation lodged against her husband in 1999.
And neither has any other reporter.
In fact, the account given by Clinton rape accuser Juanita Broaddrick to reporter Lisa Myers should have been a major NBC exclusive. But Russert and other network decision-makers sat on the news until after the Wall Street Journal scooped their story.
Sen. Kennedy granted a lengthy interview to ABC's "This Week" last Sunday. But host George Stephanopoulos declined to raise the Chappaquiddick scandal, where the Massachusetts Democrat left campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in a car that he had driven off a bridge - while swimming to safety himself.
Though Sharpton didn't mention the racial disparity specifically, his comments are sure to fuel speculation about whether race has anything to do with the decision by white reporters to give white Democrats like Mrs. Clinton a pass, while repeatedly pressing the leading black candidate about a 16-year-old controversy. |
