I first met Ed Schultz in 2011, when he came to Wisconsin bringing the entire set of his MSNBC show with him, to set up shop near the capitol building in Madison. He had parachuted in to cover the uprising against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public employee unions.
It was a national news story, Ed said. Never mind that The New York Times, not to mention the Obama Administration, had decided that the movement opposing Walker’s anti-union attack was dead before it ever got started.
Ed cared about issues that affected workers. He cared about working people, and was a singular voice for labor rights and social justice on national television and on his popular radio show—always leading with his tag line, “Let’s get to work.”
Ed cared about working people—and was a singular voice for labor rights and social justice.
Ed was the first member of the national media who made the nationally coordinated, rightwing assault on workers in Wisconsin a big story. He was also among the first to take a serious interest in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, when smartie-pants liberal pundits and the Hillary Clinton campaign were encouraging people to scoff at Sanders and his progressive vision.
Ed was ahead of the curve.
He was also, as so many have observed since his sudden, shocking death, a man with a very big heart.
After he came to stand with us in Wisconsin, I joined Ed on his show in New York, Washington, D.C., and even in Ed’s home state of North Dakota, where he gathered his friends, allies, and opponents to debate pipeline politics and the future of working America.
I watched him change his mind on dirty resource-extraction projects like Keystone XL, which created good jobs for union workers—something close to his heart—but at the expense of a ruined environment, trampled native lands, and the contemptuous flouting of local, democratic control by citizens over their own communities.
Ed was honest, not always elegant, caring and serious. He was also generous and loved to have fun.
After he made his move to Russian TV, I spent one of the weirdest nights of my life covering the 2016 presidential election on the set of his show in RT America’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
Other leftwing political analysts, including Chris Hedges and Mike Papantonio, did promos for their new RT shows, interspersed with pro-Putin propaganda. Ed and I sat on the set and watched Donald Trump win.
Ed was honest, passionate, sometimes wrong, and often willing to admit it.
I had serious doubts about what we were doing there that night, as it became clear that Trump would be our president and that the Russian government had played a role. But I don’t fault Ed. He was fired from MSNBC after, as he told it, he was explicitly directed not to cover Bernie Sanders by MSNBC management. Time and again he was told what he could and could not cover at MSNBC, which was “in the tank” for Hillary he said. The Russians, on the other hand, never gave him any editorial direction.
Ed was honest, passionate, sometimes wrong, and often willing to admit it.
He was the voice of a humane progressive politics that was beginning to experience a resurgence among a new generation of Americans when he died.
His legacy is the light he shined for that new generation to follow.
We miss you, Ed. Let’s get to work.
Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.