| inbluevt | Date: Thursday, 2013/09/19, 5:23 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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From The New Yorker, September 2, 2013
When the news broke—“CLEVELAND KIDNAPPING VICTIMS FREE”—Rachel Maddow wasn’t sure she had much to add. It was the kind of story that cable news loves: three women had been abducted and held hostage for years, until a garrulous local man named Charles Ramsey helped kick down the door of the house where they were kept. (In the interview that made
him a star, Ramsey reported that a neighbor had told him, “You got some big testicles to pull this off, bro.”) Maddow is a cable-news star: the defining voice of MSNBC, which makes her, surely, the most influential liberal pundit in the country.
But “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which airs every weeknight at nine, is known for even-tempered political discussion, not for screaming headlines. Maddow plays the cheerful docent, often taking viewers on a tour of the conservative movement, where she invariably finds something that inspires her not to anger but to joyful incredulity. Although her analysis is reliably liberal, she
likes to surprise viewers with obscure historical anecdotes and nimble shifts in tone; the elections in Iran, apparently, were both “geostrategically important” and “amazeballs.”
“I don’t know what to do about the Cleveland thing,” Maddow said. She was standing in front of a whiteboard that had a list of twenty-nine possible topics for that night’s show, starting with “Flake, Ayotte waffle on guns” and ending with “Emergency contraception case before a judge today.” This was her daily afternoon meeting, held in a scruffy corner of the fourth floor of Rockefeller Center, beneath a low dropped ceiling. “We don’t do crime, but it’s an interesting story,” she said, as much to herself as to the two dozen producers and researchers
clustered around her. “We have a few decisions to make about who we are as a show.”The decisions that Maddow makes go a long way toward defining what MSNBC is, too. Phil Griffin, the president, calls Maddow “our quarterback,” the person who sets the tone for the network.
A few years ago, MSNBC had a different quarterback: Keith Olbermann, a former ESPN
anchor who rose to fame during the Bush years, delivering urbane, fuguelike denunciations of a President who was sometimes known, on his show, as “you, sir.” Olbermann and MSNBC agreed to a no-fault divorce in early 2011, and Griffin has spent the past two and a half years
reinventing the network in Maddow’s image.
At almost any time of the day, you can turn it on and encounter someone whose liberalism is
earnest, upbeat, and perhaps a little wonky. Melissa Harris-Perry, one of the network’s rising stars, is a Tulane professor who rallies her followers on Twitter with the hashtag #Nerdland. . . .
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Message edited by inbluevt - Thursday, 2013/09/19, 5:27 PM |
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