MSNBC host Al Sharpton is the subject of a pair of very positive profiles in The New York Observer and GQ. Sharpton tells the Observer about his views on cable news:

“People don’t watch Bill O’Reilly or me for the weather report,” he went on. “They know we have an opinion. We said in the beginning I wasn’t objective. No one who watches my show thinks I’m objective. Fox is not objective.”

He used the weather-report crack, again, at a recent Saturday broadcast from the National Action Network’s “House of Justice” in Harlem. The crowd roared its approval, as they did with most of his laugh lines; an elderly woman in the audience remarked, “I call him the next Chris Rock.”

As for GQ, well, fellow MSNBCer Tamron Hall can’t get over “Al Sharpton: The Aroma ®”

There’s the silver tray of expensive looking liquids sitting in pretty glass bottles—why fellow MSNBC host Tamron Hall later tells me, apropos of nothing, “He’s so fashionable, but his scent! We should have smell-o-vision so you can smell how great he is … If every man smelled like Rev, I’d be married!”