Tonight, will be Ed Shultz’s last show in his 8 p.m. eastern weeknight time slot. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Ed is fired, as he’s moving to weekends in April, but there’s no question it’s a step down.
Sure, Ed has framed it as a positive thing, and even said he volunteered for it. [I think the exact language was that now he’s not “tied down” to a desk four nights a week, and he can be more active in blah blah blah.] But what else could he say if he didn’t want to wind up on Current TV with all the other MSNBC exiles? The 8 p.m. weeknight slot is home of heavy hitters like CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and Faux New’s Bill O’Reilly, and the weekend slot is home to…[crickets]…People watch news during the week, during the weekend the only issues they want to face are what restaurant to eat at. This is a demotion, plain and simple.
But why? Ed’s ratings are the second-highest on the entire network, behind only Rachel Maddow. According to the Huffington Post (and I agree with them) it’s a change of tone rather than numbers. Schultz’s “barnstorming, Midwestern, labor-friendly brand of populist liberalism has come to look more and more at odds with the increasingly elite and wonkish tone taking hold on the rest of MSNBC. The network has spent its last year grooming hosts like Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry and Ezra Klein, all of whom bring a far different approach to their work than Schultz.”
And it’s just been announced that Chris Hayes (who has all the force and gravitas of a paper airplane) will replace Ed Shultz. This is another big mistake for a network that seems content to take the mantle of “Starbucks Liberal,” as they offer a very watered-down, overly-cautious liberalism that typically ignores fiscal liberalism in favor of soft civil rights issues that most reasonable people can’t argue with.
The HuffPost nailed it when they describe the shifting tone of MSNBC as “elite and wonkish.” [You might could even argue that it dovetails with a larger problem in liberalism and the Democratic Party, which seems less interested in fiscal liberalism every year.]
And it’s a particularly sad decision since Ed actually broke a story last night (none of the big cable networks seem very concerned with investigative journalism), interviewing Scott Prouty, the man who recorded Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent video, and possibly shifted the presidential race in Obama’s favor. This is an interview 60 Minutes would have been proud to get, and it was a trending topic for twitter.
Anyway, I guess I’m saying I’ll miss Ed Shultz. More importantly, I miss the diversity of liberalism, where not everyone had to be an Ivy League graduate to have their voices heard…In fact, it was sort of the point.
Well said. Ed for Chris Hays, what a joke. Eww!!!