“This is creepy & humiliating: MSNBC devotes almost 8 minutes of airtime on @Morning_Joe to heralding the humanitarianism of its corporate owner Comcast, complete with Comcast executives touting themselves under the chyron ‘COMAST CARES DAY,’” Greenwald tweeted.
“Citation Needed” podcast co–host Adam Johnson chastised Sharpton for comparing Comcast’s corporate volunteerism with Nelson Mandela’s lifetime of human rights and civil rights work.
“Comcast property MSNBC having its nominally independent analysts and hosts doing a cultish Comcast commercial was bad enough but Al Sharpton claiming Comcast was carrying on the work of Nelson Mandela was uh something else,” Johnson wrote.
But MSNBC wasn’t alone in covering Comcast Cares Day. NBC affiliates across the nation “pitched in.” NBC Bay Area, for example, ran a PR–sounding segment that was a lot like all of the other ones. So did NBC 5 in Fort Worth, TX, NBC 10 in Philadelphia, NBC 4 in Los Angeles, NBC 5 in Chicago, and NBC Connecticut, to name a few. Other media outlets joined in, including ABC’s WTXL in Tallahassee, FL, The Denver Post, and The Tennessean, among others.