I have this very vague recollection of a point in time when I read a comment on some blog, probably Daily Kos, where a progressive was praising Ed Schultz, and I had a moment of cognitive dissonance because I thought Ed Schultz was a right-wing shock jock. It turns out, I was right. He was a right-wing shock jock before he had an epiphany.
In 1998, just two years after starting his talk show, “News and Views,” Schultz met a psychiatric nurse named Wendy Noack, who would become his second wife. Noack worked a second job running a homeless shelter for the city of Fargo, and insisted that Schultz meet her at a soup kitchen on their first date. The experience of eating a baloney sandwich while surrounded by downtrodden men whom he was paid to lambast on the air rattled Schultz’s conservative worldview, and he began what he describes as a period of soul-searching that lasted several years. During this time, he made multiple trips around his coverage area in a 38-foot RV dubbed “The Big Eddie Cruiser,” visiting with struggling farmers and other members of America’s underclass who were largely absent from media coverage during the tech boom of the ’90s. Schultz emerged from this period a changed man.
“I don’t think anyone wakes up one day and says ‘I’m a liberal,’” Schultz admits. “But I underwent a number of grassroots experiences that brought me around to a different perspective.”
Cynics can doubt Schultz’s sincerity and criticize him for his chameleon-like ambition, but I think he’s spent enough time now with working men and women that his commitment to their causes should be beyond question. He may have his faults, but he fills a critical niche among white progressives. I don’t like to paint people into tight categories, but the progressive movement is mainly made up of three groups. The first and most powerful group is made of lawmakers who represent urban areas with large minority populations. Most of these lawmakers are black, Latino, or Asian, and they dominate the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives. The second group is made up of a combination of the academic world and the liberal-minded professional classes. The scientific community has a foot in each of these camps. It’s this second group that dominates the progressive blogosphere. It’s also where you find most of the MSNBC lineup. Chris Hayes went to Brown University; Lawrence O’Donnell went to Harvard; Rachel Maddow was a Rhodes Scholar; Ezra Klein went to UCLA; Melissa Harry-Perry has a doctorate from Duke University and has taught at Princeton. So, where does Big Ed fit in? He represents the third group: labor. He represents the interests of all working men and women, regardless of race. In fact, he seems to me to have a better understanding of how the labor and urban/minority groups are co-dependent and are empowered when they stand together than any other progressive I’ve seen on television.
In Michael Meyer’s relatively unflattering profile of Ed Schultz in the Columbia Journalism Review, he suggests that Schultz sticks out like a sore thumb and may not fit MSNBC’s emerging brand.
But even as Schultz’s audience grows, he’s beginning to look out of place in an MSNBC lineup that is increasingly the domain of a wonky, erudite liberalism that is about as far from Schultz’s fired-up everyman persona as 30 Rock is from Fargo. MSNBC President Phil Griffin has been working to make the network’s brand more recognizable and coherent, and Brian Stelter, who covers the television industry for The New York Times, reported in November that anonymous sources within MSNBC had told him Schultz might be kicked out of primetime in favor of the wunderkind Ezra Klein. MSNBC denied it at the time, and when I recently suggested to Griffin that the MSNBC brand seemed to be moving away from Schultz, he disagreed: “I think we’re always tinkering and evolving the brand. But I think Ed fits in there. And I think it’s very important to have that voice talking about the issues the way Ed does.”
Now, Phil Griffin may not have the best interests of the progressives or the Democratic Party in mind. I frankly don’t think he should. His job is to make money, not to help factions or parties. But I agree with him that it is very important to have a voice like Ed’s talking the way Ed does. If people on the left are looking for growth, they can wait around until demographics does their work for them, or they can go after the working class, convincing whites, registering non-whites, and working to bridge the natural cultural and racial divides between groups.
The white progressive movement is dominated by intellectuals who have advanced degrees from top universities. There is nothing wrong with that. Except, quite often, these eggheads forget that they are numerically quite small in the overall progressive movement. Big Ed is a key piece in this landscape. So is Melissa Harris-Perry, who bridges the academic-urban/minority groups.
What’s interesting about the emerging brand of MSNBC is that it is not so much Democratic as progressive, because the emerging talent is not coming from or speaking to the more business-oriented perspective of the New Democrats or Blue Dogs. It’s coming from an urban academic perspective, sprinkled with a bit of Big Ed labor.
I hope Ed Schultz sticks around.
