Golly, what an upbeat guy MSNBC’s Ed Schultz is! If anyone else in broadcast “journalism” had just been handed a one-way ticket from primetime to Siberia, he’d probably be distraught. But not the roly-poly Schultz. He used the waning seconds of his last weekday-at-8:00 appearance not to wax nostalgic and thank loyal viewers but to say this:
I understand that Politico wrote something about the fact that I’m going to ‘a relative no-man’s land for cable news programming.’ Really? Well, I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way because we’re going to build those hours to the best hours in cable. This is what ‘The Ed Show’ has always been about. This is what ‘The Ed Show’ is going to be about: The people on the road, the stories, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, those middle class Americans who are fighting for a fair share. And their dream — their piece of the pie of this great country.
He also said, swallowing hard:
Stay here at 8 o’clock Monday through Friday because Chris Hayes is going to do a fantastic job. He’s a great, brilliant young talent who’s going to have a lot of years at 8 o’clock.
So where is Mr. Ed headed? To the 5-to-7 p.m. time slot on Saturdays and Sundays. This has got to be the quintessential middle finger from the home office. It’s not as though the network Schultz works for is anything more than second-rate at best. According to the most recent analysis at by the Numbers, which monitors cable news audience share, MSNBC is a distant second to the FOX News Channel, generating a third as many viewers in the 24-hour broadcast cycle.
The audience share for “The Ed Show,” which goes up against FNC’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” is even more of an embarrassment. On Monday, 766,000 households tuned into “The Ed Show” compared with 3,041,000 for O’Reilly — about a fourth as many viewers.
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