Rachel Maddow’s not only bringing thinking back to TV news, she’s assuring herself a spot on the Mount Rushmore of broadcasting, right next to Murrow, Cronkite, and Brokaw.
It’s deceptively quiet at 9 o’clock on a weeknight in the MSNBC studio at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Shoulder-to-shoulder workstations rest on a rat maze of tables, and a smiling jack-o’-lantern sits atop the first desk at the door -- an indication that this might not be a typically staid newsroom. At the far end of the floor is a small show set, where Rachel Maddow is typing at breakneck speed during a commercial break, keeping up with the constantly altering face of the U.S. political scene even as her live show is on the air.
“Change” has been the promise of this year’s historic election, but in this small studio a big change has already taken place. MSNBC took a risk in giving a prime-time news show to Maddow, the host of an eponymous radio show on Air America; how would an unapologetically far left–leaning lesbian do with her own news show? The answer came when, her second week on the air, Maddow beat the ratings suspenders right off the mighty Larry King, topping King both in total viewers and in the 25–54 demographic. And in less than two months, MSNBC’s ratings during her time slot spiked from an average viewership of 800,000 to 1.7 million.
“I am a proxy for everyone I know,” Maddow says to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as she looks for some sign of hope about the country’s financial free fall during that night’s “Talk Me Down” segment. (Things being what they are, even Nobel laureate Krugman is unable to help.) Her offhand statement sums up a large part of Maddow’s sudden, intense appeal: To her viewers, she’s a peer. Other pundits are white men as angry as the angry white men they grill; most political analysts seem detached from what’s happening around them. Maddow clearly knows what she’s talking about, but she speaks plainly, with the familiar pop-culture dialect used in real-people discussions at the bar; she described the presidential debates as “non sequitur-y” and used the jack-o’-lantern to illustrate the economy’s collapse by comparing Lehman Bros. bigwigs to kids who gorge themselves sick on Halloween candy. When exposing the rhetoric and outright lies of politicians, she ditches courtroom-style accusations for barely contained mirth. She’s sarcastic, but not bitingly so, and everyone is in on the joke—even those from whom she’s gleefully demanding honesty. Whether by nature or keen observation, she’s broken from both the holier-than-thou and gloom-and-doom approaches to punditry and offers something different: truth, with a twist. She’s now the go-to gal for people too embarrassed to admit they were getting much of their news from Jon Stewart.
Even more exciting than having achieved this level of success as an out lesbian is the fact that her intelligence, wit, and fresh take on politics have overshadowed the fact that she’s an out lesbian.
“Finally! Me being on television and being out is not a cover story in the mainstream news,” Maddow says after the show wraps and she heads to her office. There, she performs a fascinating transformation. First she switches from one of her tasteful, understated on-camera suits back into her off-duty uniform of baggy jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a track jacket. (Actually, she undressed in the ladies’ room, explaining, “I was in my office, and I looked out the window and saw some guy changing his shirt in his office. And I thought, Hey, if I can see you…”) Then she makes a beeline for the makeup room, where she takes out five-week-old contact lenses -- “I’ve been too busy to get new ones” -- and smears goo all over her eyes, creating huge blue-gray eye-shadow circles that look like cartoon shiners. After it all gets wiped off with a tissue, the horn-rimmed glasses go on and -- ta-da! -- Lois Lane has morphed into Clark Kent.
Since becoming a “10-year overnight sensation,” as Maddow describes herself, she’s had to mix business with dinner, talking to the press about her program every night after the show wraps. “The trick is to find someplace that has decent food at 11 o’clock, good drinks -- I’m a big fan of old-man bars -- and is quiet enough to talk,” she says. Toward that end, she’s become a somewhat incongruous regular at the Waldorf Astoria’s Bull and Bear steakhouse. “You go in first,” she says, “because you’re dressed nicely, and I look like your nerdy cousin.”
There, over a perfectly made old-fashioned, Maddow -- out, proud, and unafraid to go head-to-talking-head with far-right Republican Pat Buchanan -- shows the first sign of not being completely at home in the spotlight. “I feel lucky to have all this attention and all of these people wanting to talk to me about what I’m doing,” she says. “The only hesitation I have is that I’m not interested in media about media. I feel like I sometimes struggle to be interesting in talking about how I got here.”
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