Steve Edwards: Four Decades of Good Morning, Los Angeles
Quick Bio
| Detail | Info |
| Full Name | Steven Edward Schwartz |
| Professional Name | Steve Edwards |
| Date of Birth | August 23, 1948 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Television Host, Radio Personality, Podcaster |
| Known For | Host of Good Day LA (KTTV Fox 11, 1995–2017); Hollywood Walk of Fame star |
| Education | University of Miami (BA, History) |
| Spouse | Jean Edwards |
| Children | Two |
| Hollywood Walk of Fame | Star #2, 255, 6150 Hollywood Boulevard on May 14, 2004 |
| Major Awards | LA Area Emmy Governor’s Award (2010); Emmy Nomination (1983) |
| Current Work | Podcaster; KABC radio fill-in host |
| Estimated Net Worth | ~$8 million |
Introduction
In Los Angeles, where the morning television landscape shifts constantly and hosts come and go with the reliability of Pacific fog burning off by noon, Steve Edwards was a constant. For twenty-two years, from 1995 through 2017, he was the face of Good Day LA on KTTV — the man who woke up with you, chatted through your coffee, and made the morning feel like it had already been organized and made sense of before most people had found their car keys.
He did not arrive at that position accidentally. He had spent thirty years building toward it — in Texas radio, in Chicago television, in Los Angeles as a local host, as the face of Entertainment Tonight, as a talk show fixture at multiple stations across the city. By the time he anchored Good Day LA, he was one of the most experienced morning broadcasters in American local television, a man who had made so many people’s mornings that the work had become genuinely indistinguishable from the life.
And then, in December 2017, it ended — abruptly, uncomfortably, amid allegations that ended a television career that had seemed like it would simply go on forever.
His story, from Steven Edward Schwartz in 1948 to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004 to a podcast studio in 2025, is a journey through half a century of American broadcasting told from the city that takes those things most seriously.
Early Life: The Kid From Somewhere Becoming Someone
Steven Edward Schwartz was born on August 23, 1948. The specific city of his birth has not been confirmed in public biographical sources — what sources agree on is that he grew up in the United States during the postwar baby boom years and came of age during a period when television and radio were defining the cultural landscape in ways that would shape an entire generation’s sense of what entertainment could be.
He attended the University of Miami, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. The choice of History as a subject tells you something about the kind of mind that was forming — someone interested in the arc of events, in context, in how things came to be what they are. Those are exactly the intellectual instincts that work in journalism and broadcasting, where understanding context is the foundation of explaining things clearly to people who don’t have it.
He was a child and teenager during the golden age of American broadcasting — the era when radio still commanded loyalty and television was rewriting what popular culture meant. That environment shaped what he wanted to do with his life in ways that became apparent quickly after graduation.
See also “Kaho Cho: The Woman Who Loved Redd Foxx Last“
Texas Radio and the Education That Never Appears on a Resume
Steve Edwards’s first professional broadcasting job was at a radio station in Texas in the late 1960s. The specific station has been described as KMSC radio — the details of that early chapter are sparse, but the fact that he started in radio is itself significant. Radio in the 1960s was a training environment that television simply couldn’t replicate. You learned to fill time, to transition, to handle silence, to be interesting without anything visual to help you. The skills were fundamental and unforgiving.
He worked in Houston and eventually built enough of a local broadcast presence to attract attention beyond Texas. The pattern of his early career — start somewhere, do something notable, get noticed, move up — is the pattern of American broadcasting at its traditional best. There were no shortcuts. There was just the accumulated evidence of showing up and being good at it.
By the mid-1970s, that accumulated evidence was pointing him toward Chicago.
Chicago: AM Chicago and the National Conversation
In the mid-1970s, Steve Edwards joined WLS-TV in Chicago, where he hosted two programs: AM Chicago and Friday Night with Steve Edwards. Chicago television in those years was a training ground that produced some of the most significant personalities in American broadcasting history — Oprah Winfrey would later host AM Chicago herself before taking that show national.
Chicago gave Steve something that local markets provide to hosts willing to work hard enough to earn it: genuine audience connection. Chicago viewers are not easily fooled. They can tell the difference between someone who is performing and someone who is genuinely present. Steve was genuinely present. He learned to make conversation that wasn’t just television small talk — to ask questions that produced real answers, to respond to those answers in ways that moved the conversation somewhere worth going.
He also worked at that time in Houston television — the biographical record suggests movement between Texas and Chicago markets during this period, building the breadth of experience that major markets eventually required.
Los Angeles Calls: Building a City’s Morning
In 1978, Steve Edwards arrived in Los Angeles. He joined KCBS-TV, where one of his co-hosting assignments on Two on the Town placed him beside Connie Chung — who would go on to national anchor status at CBS and NBC. That early Los Angeles work demonstrated the company he was capable of keeping.
The Los Angeles television landscape in the late 1970s and into the 1980s was competitive in a specific way — a market of enormous size, enormous ambition, and an entertainment industry adjacency that gave morning television a celebrity access dimension that no other city quite matched. Navigating that landscape required someone who could be comfortable with industry professionals, with movie stars, with musicians, with politicians, and with the regular viewers who watched none of those people’s films or records but wanted to feel like they were part of the same conversation.
He co-hosted AM Los Angeles on KABC-TV from 1986 to 1990. He also hosted The Steve Edwards Show during the KABC period. These were years of building an audience that was specifically his — people who watched morning television because Steve Edwards was on it, not simply because the set was turned on.
Entertainment Tonight: The National Moment
In 1982, Steve Edwards became the host of Entertainment Tonight — the syndicated television entertainment magazine program that was, in the early 1980s, redefining how American television covered celebrity culture. He was also associated with Entertainment This Week during this period.
The ET role was nationally significant in a way that his Los Angeles work, however substantial, was not. He was now being seen across the country, in markets that didn’t know his name, by audiences who had no preexisting relationship with him. He had to introduce himself through the work rather than through accumulated local familiarity.
He received an Emmy Award nomination in 1983 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Informational Programming — recognition from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences that the work being done at the national level was of the quality that warranted attention from the industry’s most significant recognition body. It was not a win, but a nomination from the Television Academy in a competitive category is itself a statement about the level at which someone is operating.
The ET chapter was relatively brief — he left the host position in 1983 — but it established him as someone capable of national-level work while he continued building his Los Angeles career.
Good Day LA: The Twenty-Two-Year Chapter
In March 1995, Steve Edwards joined KTTV Fox 11 as anchor and host of Good Day LA. He was forty-six years old. He would remain in that chair for twenty-two years.
The longevity is the headline. Twenty-two years in morning television at a single station is genuinely extraordinary. Co-hosts came and went — Jillian Barberie was among his most prominent and long-running partners, and the chemistry between them made Good Day LA appointment viewing for a significant portion of the Los Angeles audience for years. Producers changed. The format evolved. The news landscape shifted dramatically with the internet and social media. Steve Edwards remained.
What he brought to the Good Day LA chair was exactly what the Chicago years had built: genuine conversational presence, the ability to make transitions feel natural rather than performed, the ease with celebrities that came from decades of interviewing them, and the warmth that made viewers feel like the television was on because they actually wanted to watch rather than simply because they needed noise in the morning.
In 2001, the success of Good Day LA led to a national syndicated version, Good Day Live, which ran for one year before being cancelled due to ratings that didn’t sustain the ambition. The experiment was short-lived, but its existence confirmed that the producers believed Steve Edwards had a national audience in him.
He was also a panelist on Hollywood Squares at various points during his television career, adding another entertainment format to a resume already notable for its breadth.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Governor’s Award
On May 14, 2004, Steve Edwards received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — star number 2,255, located at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard, in the Television category. The star ceremony was attended by colleagues and fans, with the image of Edwards at the star dedication — alongside George Lopez at the ceremony — representing one of the most photographed moments of his public career.
A star on the Walk of Fame is awarded by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce based on professional achievement, length of career, and community contribution. It is a recognition of sustained excellence in the entertainment industry, not of a single moment or achievement. Receiving it in 2004, after twenty-six years in Los Angeles broadcasting, reflected exactly that kind of accumulated significance.
At the 62nd Annual Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards in 2010, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded him the Governor’s Award, the most esteemed honor the Academy gives locally, reserved for individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the television industry over a career. It placed Steve Edwards in the category of people whose work had shaped the medium rather than simply operated within it.
December 2017: The End That No One Saw Coming
On December 11, 2017, KTTV Fox 11 issued a statement that was brief and unambiguous: “We can confirm that Steve Edwards is no longer employed by KTTV.”
The abruptness of the departure — the absence of a farewell broadcast, the lack of the kind of extended send-off that a twenty-two-year anchor would normally receive — indicated that this was not a retirement or a graceful exit. According to reporting from FTV Live, confirmed by coverage in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Wrap, Edwards was dismissed following sexual harassment allegations made by co-workers.
Steve Edwards did not issue a detailed public statement addressing the allegations. KTTV did not elaborate beyond the confirmation of his departure. The specifics of what was alleged and what was investigated have not been made fully public.
The context mattered: December 2017 was a specific moment in American public life. Earlier that fall, the #MeToo movement erupted, and organizations from many sectors were reacting to accusations that had not been addressed before. Edwards was one of numerous media figures in the final weeks of 2017 whose departure from prominent positions was connected to harassment allegations surfacing in that environment.
His co-host Jillian Barberie addressed the situation indirectly on social media. Other former colleagues reacted publicly. The television world that had been his professional home for fifty years processed the news with the mixture of shock, sadness, and recognition that characterized the moment more broadly.
Personal Life: Jean and the Children Behind the Camera
Steve Edwards has been married to Jean Edwards throughout his years of public prominence. She has maintained a private life, appearing occasionally in the context of professional events and awards ceremonies rather than as a public figure in her own right. Together they have two children, whose names and specific biographical details have not been made part of the public record.
The marriage has been both long and private — a combination that is itself notable for someone whose professional life was spent in front of cameras, in public spaces, with constant audience contact. He kept his family out of the morning television conversation, a choice that says something about the boundary he maintained between the public Steve Edwards who woke up Los Angeles every morning and the private Steven Edward Schwartz who went home to the people who knew him as that.
His physical presence — a good-looking man who aged with the kind of graceful maintenance that Los Angeles professional culture tends to encourage — contributed to a screen presence that remained consistently effective across five decades of broadcasting.
After KTTV: Podcasts, Radio, and a Quieter Career
In the years following his 2017 departure from KTTV, Steve Edwards returned to the medium where he started: radio. He became a regular fill-in host at KABC — the station where he had hosted AM Los Angeles decades earlier — returning to an institution that had been part of his career long before Good Day LA defined it.
He also launched podcasts: OK LA, co-hosted with former Good Day LA partners Jillian Barberie and Dorothy Lucey, which brought the conversational dynamic of that morning show into a digital audio format; and Steve Edwards Confessions, which offered longer, more in-depth interview conversations of the kind that the morning television format had never quite had time for.
The podcast work represents a genuine engagement with the present state of media rather than a retreat from it. Steve Edwards at seventy-something is still making content, still in conversation with an audience, still curious about the same things that made him good at his job for fifty years.
Net Worth: An Honest Picture
Steve Edwards’s net worth is estimated at approximately eight million dollars — a figure that reflects the accumulated earnings of a career that included decades as a senior television anchor in the second-largest media market in the United States, national syndication, awards recognition, and various endorsement and appearance income across fifty years of professional visibility.
KTTV anchor positions at the senior level that Steve occupied are among the most well-compensated in local television, with veteran anchors in major markets regularly earning between $500,000 and $1 million annually. His twenty-two years at KTTV alone, even at a conservative salary estimate, would have generated substantial accumulated earnings. The earlier decades of work in Chicago, Houston, and at the KABC and KCBS networks in Los Angeles added further to that total.
His departure from KTTV did not involve public litigation or settlement payments that have been documented, and the financial terms of his exit are not part of the public record.
Final Words
Steve Edwards built a broadcasting career that most people in the industry would consider an extraordinary success: fifty years in front of microphones and cameras, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, a Governor’s Emmy, twenty-two years anchoring one of Los Angeles’s most beloved morning programs. He did all of that through genuine craft — the ability to be warm without being saccharine, informed without being condescending, funny without being a comedian, and present without being exhausting.
The way it ended diminished the achievement without erasing it. The allegations that ended his time at KTTV are part of his story and need to be told as part of it. They are not the whole story, and they don’t cancel what came before — but they are genuinely significant and belong in any honest accounting of who Steve Edwards was and what the trajectory of his career actually looked like from beginning to end.
He gave Los Angeles fifty years of mornings. That is real. The ending is also real. Both things can be true simultaneously, and any biography that omits either one isn’t doing the subject or the reader justice.
See also “Kaho Cho: The Woman Who Loved Redd Foxx Last“
FAQs
1. Who is Steve Edwards?
Steve Edwards is an American television host and broadcaster born Steven Edward Schwartz on August 23, 1948. He is best known as the longtime anchor and co-host of Good Day LA on Fox affiliate KTTV in Los Angeles, a position he held from 1995 until his abrupt dismissal in December 2017. He has also hosted Entertainment Tonight, AM Los Angeles, and numerous other programs across a fifty-year broadcasting career.
2. What is Steve Edwards’s real name?
He was born Steven Edward Schwartz. He adopted Steve Edwards as his professional name at the start of his broadcasting career and has used it throughout his public life. The name change is common practice in broadcasting.
3. Where did Steve Edwards go to college?
He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of Miami. The degree provided the intellectual foundation — particularly in context and narrative — that serves broadcasters and journalists across their careers.
4. How did Steve Edwards begin his career?
He started in radio in Texas in the late 1960s, working at KMSC radio, before moving to Chicago in the mid-1970s. He was the host of Friday Nite with Steve Edwards and AM Chicago on WLS-TV in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, joining KCBS-TV and co-hosting Two on the Town alongside Connie Chung.
5. What was Steve Edwards’s connection to Entertainment Tonight?
He served as the host of Entertainment Tonight in 1982 and 1983, during the early years of the show that became one of American television’s most significant entertainment news programs. He received an Emmy nomination in 1983 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Informational Programming for that work.
6. What was Steve Edwards’s role on Good Day LA?
He joined KTTV Fox 11 as anchor and co-host of Good Day LA in March 1995 and remained in that role for twenty-two years. The morning program was one of Los Angeles’s most watched local broadcasts during his tenure, and his chemistry with various co-hosts — particularly Jillian Barberie — made it appointment television for a significant audience.
7. When did Steve Edwards receive his Hollywood Walk of Fame star?
He received his star on May 14, 2004. It is star number 2,255, located at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard in the Television category. The ceremony was attended by colleagues and fans and represented recognition of his sustained contribution to Los Angeles broadcasting across more than twenty-five years in the market.
8. What awards did Steve Edwards receive?
He received the Governor’s Award at the 62nd Annual Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards in 2010 — the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ most prestigious local honor, given for outstanding career contribution to television. He also earned numerous Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards throughout his career and received a national Emmy nomination in 1983 for his work on Entertainment Tonight.
9. Why was Steve Edwards fired from KTTV?
Edwards “is no longer employed” at KTTV, the station declared on December 11, 2017. According to reports from FTV Live, confirmed by Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Wrap, he was dismissed following sexual harassment allegations made by co-workers. Neither the station nor Edwards provided detailed public statements about the specific allegations.
10. Who is Steve Edwards married to?
He is married to Jean Edwards. Their marriage has been long-standing and private, with Jean maintaining a life outside the public spotlight despite her husband’s prominent media career. They have two children together, whose names have not been made part of the public record.
11. What has Steve Edwards done since leaving KTTV?
Since his 2017 departure from KTTV, he has served as a regular fill-in host on KABC radio and has launched two podcasts: OK LA, co-hosted with former Good Day LA colleagues Jillian Barberie and Dorothy Lucey, and Steve Edwards Confessions, featuring long-form in-depth interviews.
12. What is Steve Edwards’s estimated net worth?
His net worth is estimated at approximately eight million dollars, reflecting fifty years of income from senior positions in major-market television and radio, including twenty-two years as a highly compensated anchor at KTTV, national syndication earnings from Entertainment Tonight and Good Day Live, and various endorsement and appearance fees across his career.
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