Ed Schultz, who has been a good friend to Teamsters and the entire labor movement, is being shoved aside at MSNBC. “The Ed Show” is being relegated to weekends.
This sharp-elbow knock of Ed from his primetime slot at 8 p.m. Eastern is bad news for working people. No one covers our issues and concerns better than Ed. In fact, no one on TV but Ed really covers them at all.
We love Ed because he gets it. He cuts through the bull with his plain talk. He doesn’t try to one-up with charts, graphs, footnotes and brainy intellect. Rather, he invites us to his kitchen table for a nightly chat. His passion for improving the lives of the middle class is contagious.
If you don't agree with MSNBC's decision, you can call NBC Universal at 212.664.4444, or email Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC. at phil.griffin@nbcuni.com.
Remember that Ed walks the talk too. He gave a great speech at our last Unity conference and donated $20,000 to the James R. Hoffa Memorial Scholarship Fund. He frequently hosts Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa to talk about our issues.
But now, working people’s voices will only be heard on weekends. That’s not good. Ed has been instrumental in bringing light to the war on workers being waged across the country and that attention has made a difference.
Five days after Job-killer Gov. Scott Walker dropped his anti-union bomb on Wisconsin on Feb. 11, 2011, Schultz began covering the protest. Sourcewatch tells us:
MSNBC’s Ed Schultz kicked off media coverage of the Wisconsin protests by spending his show's hour focusing on the unprecedented people power being demonstrated in Wisconsin. Schultz said that this is a fight for the "soul of America."He later brought his show to Madison, camping out in the cold with the angry protesters. Many Wisconsinites believe the 14 state senators would never have left the state had it not been for The Ed Show.
Last night, Ed scored an interview with Scott Prouty, the bartender who videotaped the now-famous video in which Mitt Romney trashed 47 percent of Americans at a fund-raiser.
Prouty is a bartender who worked the event and brought a camera in case staff got a chance afterward to take photos with Romney, as had occurred when Bill Clinton once visited. He was moved by Romney’s remarks about conditions at a Chinese factory. But he was prompted to release the tape because he was taken aback by the way Romney treated workers at the event, those 47 percenters.
As the Washington Post reported:
The service industry worker was also miffed by the way Romney addressed the staff at the event, asking as soon as he arrived for them to move things along.
Prouty had actually tended bar at a previous Romney event and served the candidate a Diet Coke with lemon. “He took it and turned and didn’t say anything,” Prouty told the Huffington Post. “He took it out of my hand and turned his back without a ‘thank you’ or anything else.”
He’s hoping to work with pro-labor organizations in the future; and he’s a man of greater empathy than Mitt Romney. It was all good television.Prouty hadn't spoken to anyone in the media before. Here's why he chose The Ed Show:
In his live interview with Schultz, he said: “I thank you for speaking out for workers all across America. That’s the reason I’m here today is because you have a voice that — I think we need more voices like yourself.”We couldn't agree more.
