Maddow About You (Rachel on AIDS, via POZ Magazine)

[pinto]

Maddow About You
by Bob Ickes

Rachel Maddow, the host of MSNBC’s white-hot The Rachel Maddow Show, has been an avid AIDS activist for years. Now, she addresses the topic on prime-time TV. Is Maddow our new Edward R. Murrow?

Rachel Maddow first appeared on our pages when she was a freelance reporter struggling to pay the rent. For POZ’s July/August 2003 issue, she penned a piece on the advances in HIV prison care, a topic to which she has committed 15 years of her life—by serving as a health care advocate for those living with the virus behind bars. While getting her PhD at Oxford University she wrote a brilliant thesis on the topic (HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons). Today, she is the instantly recognizable host both of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, a relatively new, nightly news portal that filters politics and culture through her unapologetically personal sensibility, and a radio program of the same name on the Air America network.

Her history as an advocate for people living with HIV informs her current work; she is an American broadcaster well informed about AIDS activism and public policy—a striking counterpoint to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who reports mostly on the realm of pure medicine and epidemiology. Unlike much of America’s mainstream press, Maddow and her show have not shied away from the topic of stateside HIV, indicting former President George W. Bush’s domestic policy on AIDS and highlighting the recently reported statistic that at least 3 percent of Washington, DC, residents are living with the virus. On air, Maddow eulogized legendary treatment activist Martin Delaney, the great leader of Project Inform who died in January; she challenged president-elect Obama for considering a candidate for the position of director of National AIDS Policy who didn’t support needle exchange (he was not appointed, and our current “AIDS Czar” favors needle exchange as a scientifically proven form of AIDS prevention); and she featured AIDS pioneer Cleve Jones the day after Milk’s Oscar splash. And yet, her program’s AIDS-related segments, while estimable and often unreported elsewhere, typically differ in urgency, not in frequency, from those of the big-three networks. Despite her background as someone willing to fight for the rights of people living with HIV, Maddow is vigilant about distinguishing the job description of “activist” from that of “broadcaster”—and she bristles at any suggestion that her work as an AIDS activist confers an obligation upon her work as a prime-time pundit.

I’ve always thought broadcasting and activism are two totally different things,” says Maddow, 36, in what has been described in innumerable media accounts as her everyday “13-year-old-boy” daytime uniform: jeans, white T, open buttoned-down shirt and sneakers. “And they’ve always felt that way to me. I know that’s grating to some people…I get a lot of pressure . I get a lot of talking points handed to me. I get that not only from the HIV world but also from anything that I’ve ever had any vague association with. So I get it on AIDS issues, I get it on gay issues, I get it on Massachusetts issues , California issues and on prisons and on lesbian health. And dad worked for the water company and mom’s Canadian! come in literally by the hour. And, of course, when someone overtly and publicly presents you with talking points, that guarantees that you will never use them. I am happy to take an idea from anyone. When Marty died, I got a heads-up from a very good friend in the movement who offered to hook me up with some information. But I opted to . I don’t take talking points from the president, so I’m not going to take them from anyone else. That’d be the death of me.”

http://www.poz.com/articles/rachel_maddow_hiv_2331_16629.shtml