Rachel Maddow on standing up to government lies and her Walter Cronkite Award

Maddow received one of the afternoon’s top honors for MS NOW’s (formerly MSNBC) The Rachel Maddow Show episode “Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once,” a broadcast that captured more than 1,400 “Hands Off” protests that erupted nationwide on April 7, during the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term. The episode stitched together footage from cities, suburbs, and rural towns, presenting the demonstrations not as isolated expressions of dissent but as a national political response taking shape in real time. Maddow attended the ceremony accompanied by her longtime partner, Susan Mikula.

In an exclusive interview with The Advocate at the ceremony, Maddow said she remains convinced that the most important political story in the country is not centered in D.C. “Our fate is not going to be determined by what happens in Washington and by what the administration wants to do,” she said. “What’s going to determine what happens to us is the reaction — how the country deals with it and the sort of institutional response.”

That framework, democracy measured by public resistance rather than executive intent, now runs through much of Maddow’s work across television and podcasting. Earlier this month, she launched Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order, a six-part podcast series examining the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the suppressed evidence that revealed it was unnecessary and rooted in racial hatred.

Maddow described the project to The Advocate as an effort to resist comforting myths about history. “I’m trying to not just make us remember what we did there,” she said, “but trying to make us get real about how we think of that as a very black-and-white moral wrong.” The danger, she explained, is assuming that injustice only happens when villains are obvious and resistance is easy. “These decisions are hard in the moment,” she said.

Burn Order traces how an executive order authorized the roundup of innocent Japanese Americans, how internal dissent was ignored or buried, and how a bombshell document, ordered destroyed, eventually exposed the truth. Maddow said she wanted the podcast to function as what she called a “moral mirror,” forcing listeners to confront how ordinary institutions and individuals can capitulate even when they know something is wrong.

Maddow also spoke at length about the podcast’s distinctive score, which she said plays a structural role in the narrative. “In this one in particular, I just feel like it’s so integrated with the vibe of what’s going on in the storytelling,” she said. The score, she explained, is entirely original and was composed by a young student composer the team recruited for the project. When producers asked for adjustments — more tension, a sense of urgency — the composer turned around new material within hours, including music with a literal ticking clock embedded in it. “It’s amazing,” Maddow said.

The themes Maddow explores in the podcast echo her analysis of the present. Americans, she said, are often encouraged to wait for a singular, unmistakable moment when authoritarianism arrives. “That moment is here. It’s happening,” she said. She pointed to the rise of masked, unidentified law enforcement agents patrolling neighborhoods and pulling people off the streets, and the instinctive backlash she has observed from people encountering it. “You don’t need to read a lot of academic books on fascism to know what that looks like.”

Maddow meant to make a statement by attending the awards ceremony. She that she rarely attends awards events, not out of ideology, but out of temperament. “I’m kind of allergic to it,” she admitted, describing a long-standing aversion to the ritual of professional self-congratulation. This day, however, felt different.

The Cronkite Award, she said, was not really about her. It recognized coverage of mass protests, work that required building something close to an entirely new reporting apparatus, and she wanted the people who did that work to be seen. “I wanted to be here in part just to acknowledge how hard my staff on my show has worked to make that coverage happen,” Maddow told The Advocate.

Onstage, she used her acceptance remarks to highlight the invisible labor behind that coverage. She described her team’s painstaking process of verifying user-generated protest footage, systematically scanning local newspapers and TV broadcasts, and reaching out directly to newsrooms to ask whether any material had never made it to air. There is no standing national infrastructure to support decentralized civic action at scale, she said, and building one would require extraordinary effort.

The honor, she added, belonged to producers and associate producers who had reshaped their jobs to track political action outside Washington — often without precedent, and with little guarantee the skill set would ever be reusable. That reality, Maddow said, was precisely the problem. In a democracy, she argued, journalism is structurally built to monitor institutions, not movements — even when those movements may ultimately decide the country’s fate.

“There are lots of systems in place to cover the powerful,” Maddow said. “What we don’t have systems for is covering the people — especially when they are acting politically.”

That approach has also translated into audience momentum. According to an MS NOW spokesperson citing Nielsen data, The Rachel Maddow Show has beaten Fox News’s Hannity for five consecutive Mondays among viewers in the key demographic. In the most recent week, the program was up 25 percent in the demo, the spokesperson said.

If Maddow’s award focused on public response, CBS’s Scott Pelley confronted institutional pressure head-on. Pelley accepted a Cronkite Award on behalf of 60 Minutes for “Rule of Law,” an investigation into executive orders targeting law firms deemed hostile to the president. The reporting aired amid corporate upheaval at Paramount, CBS’s parent company, which, following a merger with Skydance, appointed controversial queer conservative journalist Bari Weiss as editor in chief of the venerated news division, prompting concerns about editorial independence.

Pelley brought up those anxieties while offering reassurance. “Last season, all of our stories got on the air,” he said. “We got them all on the air with an absolute minimum of interference.” He also noted the loss of senior newsroom leaders and warned that fear itself has become a growing obstacle to accountability reporting.

NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander was honored for “Holding the Powerful Accountable,” with judges praising his persistence in live questioning despite personal attacks from the president. In remarks that drew knowing laughter and sustained applause, Alexander reflected on the costs of that role and why he believes it remains essential.

He rejected the idea that journalism’s job is to take sides. “I’m not an advocate for Republicans or for Democrats,” Alexander said. “I’m an advocate for the facts, even and especially when it isn’t easy.” He described being shouted down, insulted, and publicly dismissed during press briefings, moments that viewers often ask him about afterward. His answer, he said, is simple: “My job is the next question.” He added, "Those moments reflect on the other person, not on me."

Alexander also shared a personal story about his grandmother, Faye, who lived to be 105 and closely followed his work. After one particularly heated exchange at the White House, a critic attacked him online. Faye responded with three words that Alexander said he has never forgotten: “Drop that, Helen.” The room laughed, but the point landed.

“Being a journalist does not mean being popular,” he said. “It means never giving up.”

Comedian and activist Jon Stewart received the inaugural Cronkite Award for comedic news and commentary for The Daily Show, recognizing satire’s role in translating investigative reporting into mass-audience accountability. In a video message, Stewart, who couldn’t attend because of his Broadway debut, joked about being placed anywhere near Walter Cronkite’s legacy, but organizers emphasized that his work rests on deep reporting and has helped reach audiences that traditional news outlets increasingly struggle to engage.