http://www.alternet.org/story/101008/rachel_maddow%3A_political_game_changerRachel Maddow: Political Game ChangerBy Sam Boyd, The American Prospect. Posted October 4, 2008.
For years, liberals thought they could catch up in the media by playing by conservatives' rules. Maddow proves it's better to just change the game. "I think I have a fear in general about whether being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be," Rachel Maddow tells me over dinner at a Latin restaurant in lower Manhattan. It's more than the ordinary self-deprecation of someone who just got her own cable commentary show. It's an insecurity essential to the on-air style that's powered the 35-year-old's rapid rise from a wacky morning radio show in western Massachusetts to the liberal radio network Air America and now to her own prime-time show on MSNBC.
Maddow is not a Tim Russert or a Chris Matthews -- an ostensibly nonpartisan interviewer who badgers politicians and policy-makers about contradictions in their records. Nor is she a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck -- an attack dog who deals in calculated anger, bluster, and outrage. She's no mild-mannered liberal like Alan Colmes or a veteran observer like Wolf Blitzer or David Gregory. Maddow has broken the broadcasting mold. She has succeeded as an avowed liberal on television precisely because she is not a liberal version of conservatives like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Unlike so many progressive media figures who sought to replicate the on-air habits of the aggressive shock jocks of the right, she stumbled upon a workable style for the left. She is liberal without apology or embarrassment, bases her authority on a deep comprehension of policy rather than the culture warrior's claim to authenticity, and does it all with a light, even slightly mocking, touch. She proves that liberals can attract viewers on television when they actually act like, well, liberals.
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Maddow started her career with more interest in changing policy than in changing the media. After attending Stanford, she studied at Oxford, where as a Rhodes scholar (she says she was the first openly gay American to receive the honor) she completed a dissertation that expanded on work she was already doing as an AIDS activist. Her efforts were based on a profound public-health insight: Prisons offer a surprising opportunity for AIDS prevention and treatment because inmates are a vulnerable population collected in one place and have a constitutional right to health care.
In 1999, Maddow was supporting herself with odd jobs (she met her partner Susan Mikula after the artist hired Maddow to do yard work) when she attended an open casting call for a disc-jockey position at a local radio station in Northampton, Massachusetts, and scored her own morning show. Five years later, when she heard about a new liberal radio network forming in New York, which would come to be known as Air America, she concocted what she calls a great "caper" to get a job at the network -- involving, among other gambits, having an ex-girlfriend impersonate one of Al Franken's students at Harvard.
Her caper paid off, and she was tapped to co-host a show with network executive and Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead and rapper Chuck D of the group Public Enemy. (Maddow is perhaps the only person who can claim she has worked regularly with both Chuck D and Pat Buchanan.) But the show never took off and was replaced with a program hosted by Jerry Springer. Maddow convinced the network to give her a solo show and despite being shuffled from time slot to time slot, was able to build an audience via her podcast. She has held on to her radio show, which currently airs from 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. Eastern time, even after making the jump to TV.
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Bill Wolff, vice president of prime-time programming at MSNBC, says that, of all the hosts and guest hosts he's worked with, Maddow is the hardest-working. When she guest-hosted for Countdown, she'd pre-record her radio show and arrive at MSNBC studios at 9 A.M. for a show that started at 6 P.M. She spent the time researching -- even delving into topics that weren't on the agenda. "I've been in the TV game a long time, and I've never seen anyone -- anyone! -- prepare like she prepares," Wolff says.
When I visited her at Air America a month before her MSNBC show was announced, Maddow spent most of her working hours in the cramped and messy office that she shares with her radio show's executive producer. The office -- the walls of which are adorned with a holographic picture of a unicorn and a shooting target -- is where she holds the daily news meeting for her Air America show. At that day's meeting, Maddow did most of the talking -- accepting, rejecting, or modifying ideas definitively and quickly. "It's a great advantage to me that I've almost always done a full radio-show prep period before I've done any prime-time or late-night," she says. (In this, she has something in common with right-wing radio hosts like Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck, who do both radio and TV.)
Maddow's immersion in facts rather than in opinions has helped shape her on-air persona. When Pat Buchanan, who joined Maddow on MSNBC's election-night panel throughout the presidential primary, claimed that the expansion of the health-care program S-CHIP would give money to already well-off families, Maddow quickly pointed out that 8 million children in the very income group he claimed could afford insurance don't have it. And in another segment, when conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said John McCain had not backtracked on previous support for immigration reform, Maddow was ready with examples of how McCain had reversed himself on the issue during the primary campaign. "When you see how hard she works and how much of a pro she is, that's magic to producers. She just kills it," Wolff says. "And that preparation is seen in the ease with which she goes topic to topic and the seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of current events she displays in the conversation."
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