There is no one brighter than Rachel on television today -- she's re-writing all the rules.
Image via NYTimes;
"Ms. Maddow has the character and political passion; what she doesn’t have is a worthy opponent." [The TV Watch: A Fresh Female Face Amid Cable Schoolboys, by ALESSANDRA STANLEY; NYTimes, September 24, 2008]
via Huffington Post: How Maddow Is Rewriting The Rules Of Cable News; published at The American Prospect | September 24, 2008 11:19 AM:
Channel Changer
For years, liberals thought they could catch up in media by playing by conservatives' rules. Rachel Maddow's success proves it's better to just change the game.
Sam Boyd
"I think I have a fear in general about whether being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be," Rachel Maddow tells me over dinner at a Latin restaurant in lower Manhattan. It's more than the ordinary self-deprecation of someone who just got her own cable commentary show. It's an insecurity essential to the on-air style that's powered the 35-year-old's rapid rise from a wacky morning radio show in western Massachusetts to the liberal radio network Air America and now to her own prime-time show on MSNBC.
Maddow is not a Tim Russert or a Chris Matthews--an ostensibly nonpartisan interviewer who badgers politicians and policy-makers about contradictions in their records. Nor is she a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck--an attack dog who deals in calculated anger, bluster, and outrage. She's no mild-mannered liberal like Alan Colmes or a veteran observer like Wolf Blitzer or David Gregory. Maddow has broken the broadcasting mold. She has succeeded as an avowed liberal on television precisely because she is not a liberal version of conservatives like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Unlike so many progressive media figures who sought to replicate the on-air habits of the aggressive shock jocks of the right, she stumbled upon a workable style for the left. She is liberal without apology or embarrassment, bases her authority on a deep comprehension of policy rather than the culture warrior's claim to authenticity, and does it all with a light, even slightly mocking, touch. She proves that liberals can attract viewers on television when they actually act like, well, liberals.
