Rachel Maddow: Progressive Media's Next Mainstream Star

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted April 10, 2008.

As the seemingly endless Democratic presidential primary slog enters its second spring, one amazing woman has managed -- by relentless dint of hard work, long experience, sharp intelligence, quick wit, quicker quips and a winning smile -- to shatter the glass ceiling and take her rightful place in the traditional boys' club of big-time politics.

No, not her -- Rachel Maddow!

That's right -- a woman who calls herself "a supplicant who worships in the Temple of Journalism" -- but who others have described as "Amy Goodman with animal noises" -- is now firmly ensconced in the upper echelon of the political punditocracy. With her own rising radio show on Air America, coupled with regular appearances on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann program, where she is often, oddly and excellently paired with Patrick Buchanan, this self-described "35-year-old, liberal, lesbian girl-who-looks-like-a-man" is on the brink of becoming progressive media's next mainstream breakout star. One significant measure of Maddow's new-found favor: the decision by MSNBC, effective next week, to hire her as a regular panelist on its newest nightly campaign program Race for the White House -- and to allow Air America to simulcast the 6 p.m. nightly program as the first hour of its own nightly Rachel Maddow show.

The cable executives are betting a lot on their new program, which also features NBC News' chief White House correspondent David Gregory (who replaces the execrable Tucker Carlson.) Passionate viewer interest in the ongoing presidential race -- as evidenced by increased ratings for programs focused on campaign news -- has led all three 24/7 cable operations to create new shows to cater to the marketplace demand. Race for the White House will be up against stiff competition from CNN's Election Center and Fox News Channel's America's Election HQ, but installing Maddow as a regular gives MSNBC an edge its competitors can't match -- a telegenic and true progressive voice for an election cycle dominated by progressive politics and politicians. The MSNBC simulcast on Air America -- in addition to making an impressive statement about the progressive radio network's growing stature -- also promises to pull in a new progressive audience to MSNBC, which is successfully positioning itself as the hot new alternative to Fox News in the cable firmament.

I sat down early one recent morning to share breakfast with Maddow, who keeps a punishing schedule that begins at 9 a.m., encompasses hours of preparation for her three-hour live Air America program, and often extends far into the endless cable night. A California native dedicated to promoting AIDS prevention and gay rights -- she claims to have been the first openly gay American to receive a Rhodes scholarship -- Maddow is also articulate, winsome, and often self-deprecating, someone who says in the same sentence that she tries "to be authoritative, transparently sourced, and pretty comprehensive" in her work, while remaining "a total dork."

Like most radio talk show hosts, Maddow is forthright about the fact that she is NOT a journalist. "I think of myself as a commentator and a pundit, an analyst but not a reporter and not a journalist," she told me. "You know, I think doing research isn't enough ... (she laughs) to be considered a journalist."

Maddow started in radio less than a decade ago as a sidekick on a commercial show in western New England, when she went to an open on-air audition and was hired on the spot. "As soon as I started talking on the microphone, I was like, 'Oh, right! This is what I'm supposed to be doing,'" she recalled. "I wish I figured this out before I was 26. I realized that I had a knack for it, and that it was really fun." Still, she wasn't convinced that radio was right for her in the long run, so after a year, she took time off, finished a dissertation "and actually did get my doctoral." Four years later, she had a national radio show. What happened?

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Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is now completing AlterNet’s first-ever book, which is on the subject of right-wing radio talkers like O’Reilly, and will be available early in 2008. O'Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

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