Former MSNBC and Russia Today America Broadcast Journalist Ed Schultz Dies at 64

Veteran journalist Ed Schultz has died at the age of 64 years old. Sources from ABC affiliate WDAY-TV in Fargo, North Dakota, where he previously worked as a sports editor, have said that Schultz passed away due to natural causes in his own home on July 5 in Washington, D.C. His death was also confirmed by his recent previous employer, RT America.

Born in 1954 in Norfolk, Virginia, Schultz, a former College football player and a graduate of Minnesota State University Moorehead outside of Fargo, began as a minor league football player in the late 1970’s. Throughout the 1980’s, he started out as a sports broadcaster and editor for various television and radio stations in the Fargo area. By the 1990’s, Schultz transitioned towards conservative talk radio on WDAY, North Dakota’s oldest radio station now owned by Forum Communications. As the 2000’s and the 2010;s came around, his own political views became more progressive, especially as his own radio show, The Ed Schultz Show, went national in 2004 and becomes a prime-time cable news host for MSNBC in 2009 with The Ed Show. In 2015, Schultz left MSNBC and started working for RT America, an international Russian state-run media network, in 2016 with his own program, The News with Ed Schultz.

Schultz was known for working-class, blue-collar progressive politics by criticizing the Obama’s Administration efforts to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between various countries in Latin America as well as the Asia-Pacific region. Schultz, who supported Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders in recent years, criticized MSNBC for his own coverage of the Sanders presidential campaign.

He will be missed.