MSNBC host Ed Schultz has been absent from his cable news program for the past week, and revealed why when he called into his radio show today.

Schultz’s wife Wendy was diagnosed last week with Ovarian Cancer, one of the most serious forms of the disease.

On “The Ed Show” last night, Michael Eric Dyson played Schultz’s message for viewers, before extending best wishes to Schultz from “The Ed Show” staff and NBC:

• The rapper 50 Cent will be a guest on MSNBC’s ‘The Ed Show’ tonight. Michael Eric Dyson will be guest-hosting for Ed Schultz, who is off this week. 50 will talk with Dyson about politics, music, pop culture, and more, live in-studio at 30 Rock.

• In last night’s HBO documentary, “41″ George H.W. Bush said the media (and this was before FNC and MSNBC) made a difference in the ’92 election: “I know I sound like I’m bashing the press. But there was almost unanimity in the press corps that I should lose, and that they were for [Clinton]. And that makes a huge difference.”

• Today at 11am, it’s the premiere of “DC Bureau,” a new weekly politics show hosted by Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Jerry Seib. The first show, on WSJ.com and WSJ Live, will feature an interview with Pres. Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod and Kevin Madden, Mitt Romney’s senior strategist.

After a recent appearance on the “Today” show, writer Mansfield Frazier posted an article on the Daily Beast about his experience on the show titled “Why I Got the Boot from the Today Show.” In it, Mansfield states that due to a misinterpretation of a previous article he’d written about Professor Skip Gates, he was brought on to provide a perspective that didn’t match his own:

So, evidently the producers of the Today show thought—mistakenly—that I was one of those conservative black writers…who earn their daily bread by exculpating whites from any responsibility for the racial tensions extant in America. So I can only imagine their surprise when I stated that there is a history in this country of negative and sometimes explosive interactions between minorities and police officers, and, with America being far and away the world leader in per capita incarceration of its own citizens, by that measure and definition we are living in a police state. Somehow I got the feeling that statements of that kind were not what I was brought on the show to give voice to.

In the article, it’s never made completely clear how or when (or even “Why”) Frazier got “the boot.” In fact, there’s not much other evidence provided at all to support Frazier’s claims about the show’s producers. We went back and watched the interview and didn’t notice anything on-air. A Today show spokeswoman tells TVNewser, “Mansfield Frazier appeared on Weekend Today along with Michael Eric Dyson to discuss the Gates controversy. The segment went well, and there were no complaints from anyone at anytime. Frazier appears to be surmising that he ‘got the boot from the TODAY show,’ which is absolutely not true. Maybe he didn’t write the headline.”

It’s common practice on the Web to use a controversial headline (something we’d never do, of course) to garner more clicks, but is Frazier—or perhaps The Daily Beast—stretching the truth a bit too much here about what actually occurred?

The 10th floor theater at the Time Warner Center was packed with hundreds of guests last night for a preview of CNN’s new Black in America series — so much so, two overflow rooms were needed.

Before the crowds watched a 30-minute preview of three upcoming specials, Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons addressed the audience. “I think they had an ulterior motive asking me here, but I can’t figure out what it is, other than that I’m black in America,” he joked.

“It’s time to start looking at things in a new prism,” he said about the documentaries.

Angela Burt-Murray, Essence editor-in-chief called the project the most “comprehensive” in media history and O’Brien called the 18-months of work, a “labor of love.”

“We needed to get our facts right but we needed to get our stories right too,” she said. “Two very different things.”

At a reception following the screening, CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein told TVNewser Black in America is getting high marks at its screenings and through an email campaign. “You can’t force people to do it. It was organic,” he said. “Viewers are responding to it. It’s been surprising and encouraging.”

A glance at the storylines, who was there, and more, after the jump…

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