In Praise of Rachel Maddow

This blog entry is dedicated to the MSNBC and Air America talk show host, Rachel Maddow.

This is not just gushing fan mail misplaced on my blog. It is a tribute to her because she embodies what this blog is all about: transformational politics.

Most of the pundits, really most of the newscasters, who I see on television are white guys. Older white guys. Let’s call them out: Keith Olbermann. Chris Matthews. Joe Scarborough. David Gergen. Bill O’Reilly. Anderson Cooper. Paul Begala. Tucker Carlson. Sean Hannity. Shep Smith. The list goes on and on. CNN boasts Campbell Brown’s show called “No Bias, No Bull” but this show didn’t kick off until Maddow was already soaring in the ratings…I have a feeling that the folks at CNN noticed how good Rachel’s show is and realized they needed to add a little estrogen to their pundit lineup.

It is not just being a woman in a sea of male pundits that makes Rachel a transformational figure in the mainstream media world. Her background and personal experience factor in as well. Rachel is the only pundit that I know of who is a Rhodes scholar. (And what I really dig about her-she is the first openly gay Rhodes scholar.) She has dedicated her life to political commentating and activist work. She has a pretty face that she isn’t afraid to contort when being silly (which she often is) when delivering her top stories of the day.

But above all of the labels and categories and notches on her resume, Rachel is transforming punditland because of what she talks about on her show and the way she talks about it. Most pundits don’t stretch their arms very wide when commenting on the news of the day. Most of them are certainly intelligent and articulate, but they limit the scope of what they discuss to what I like to call pop politics — topics like the Obama family dog, Obama being stripped of his blackberry, and the political future and book deals of the Train Wreck In Chief, Sarah Palin. These hosts aren’t contributing much to our knowledge and understanding of the news.

Maddow, by contrast, is making her viewers smarter, as New York Magazine pointed out in their November 2 piece about the talk show host (see link to the article at the bottom of this post). Maddow talks about pop politics too, but she also talks about underreported issues that mainstream punditland does not care about/care to talk about. Her program featured a segment about how the United States lost a nuclear bomb in Greenland forty years ago and how the contents of one piece of the bomb may have dissolved in the ocean. She has found a way to weave the obscure anti-bourgeois cultural movement Dadaism into her program. When interviewing President-elect Obama just days before the election (which, by the way, was a real coup of an opportunity for a relative cable TV rookie) Maddow asked tough foreign policy questions and brought up the very astute point that Obama refused to criticize the entire Republican party during the campaign, but rather had limited his criticism to McCain. The guests she brings in to help her talk about the news stretch beyond the standard cookie cutter mix of commentators like Bill Maher or Hillary Rosen — she brings in creative bloggers like Shannyn Moore and history professors like Douglas Brinkley – articulate and relative unknowns in the cable news world. The entire theme of Maddow’s show is “mind over chatter,” and she walks the talk.

Bottom line: Maddow is amazing, and really is the future of smart political commentating. My only complaint? When she’s gone for the night and a guest host takes her place – very weak sauce.

http://nymag.com/news/media/51822/