Ed Schultz
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Ed Schultz was an American broadcaster who worked at MSNBC and then at RT, where he became a colleague of John Kiriakou's. Kiriakou describes him as a friend. In his blunter account of the move, MSNBC did not lose Schultz so much as remove him: "they kicked Ed Schultz off at MSNBC and he went to RT."

The Sanders instruction

Kiriakou uses Schultz as his standing example of how editorial control operated at a mainstream cable network. Schultz was told in no uncertain terms that he could not discuss Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary, "really, you can't talk about a major primary candidate?", and he never forgave MSNBC for it.

Kiriakou tells the story alongside one of his own, as the same instruction arriving in a different envelope. His agent reported that MSNBC was interested in trying him out late at night on a weekend, and that the only thing he had to promise was never to criticise the Democratic Party. His answer was that in France, with twenty-six parties, being barred from criticising one of them would be workable, "but there's only two, so how can you do your job?" He frames the objection as practical rather than principled: it is not that the condition offends integrity, it is that nobody can meet it without sounding ridiculous.

A pattern, not a case

Schultz is one of three names Kiriakou lists when arguing that American corporate media functions as state media in everything but label, "state-run media passing as free market independent journalism." The other two are Lee Camp, who is on RT and gets treated as a Russian asset, and Chris Hedges, who left the New York Times because he would not toe the line on selling the Iraq war and whose programme On Contact then ran on RT. The common feature, in Kiriakou's account, is that the outlets "won't allow even the slightest bit of countering the narrative" put out by the government and the military-industrial complex.

The label after death

Schultz appears again in Kiriakou's account of the 2022 labelling wave. Describing how he checked his own Twitter profile daily to see whether he had been marked as an official mouthpiece of the Russian government, Kiriakou noted the two cases that showed how mechanical the process was: George Galloway, tagged although he was no longer connected to RT at all, and Ed Schultz, tagged "even though he's been dead for four years."

The Schultz half of that pairing is one of the most repeated lines in the corpus, given in near-identical wording across at least four separate appearances in the spring of 2022: "poor Ed Schultz has been dead for how many years, and they made him a, they put a tag on him saying that he's a mouthpiece of the Russian government." Kiriakou treats it as proof the state-affiliated media labels were applied without anyone thinking about them.

See also

- Kiriakou's Russian media work
- The 2022 deplatforming
- The death of investigative journalism
- Twitter state-affiliated media labels
- John Kiriakou
