Rachel Maddow: Trump's TV Nemesis
Last edited Mon Oct 9, 2017, 09:20 PM - Edit history (1)
This is a great article explaining how Maddow works daily, lots of it off-the-cuff. I just love her.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/rachel-maddow-trumps-tv-nemesis
The New Yorker
October 9, 2017 Issue
Rachel Maddow: Trump’s TV Nemesis
Her show permits liberals to enjoy themselves during what may be the most unenjoyable time of their political lives.
By Janet Malcolm
snip//
Maddow’s entrance into broadcasting began as a lark. While she was writing her thesis and doing her odd jobs in western Massachusetts, she heard about an audition held by a local radio station for someone to announce the morning news. She got the job—understandably. She has a beautiful voice, low in register but with a clarion brightness to it, and beautiful diction. This job led to others, to higher and higher rungs on the ladder of radio broadcasting (the liberal network Air America was her final radio destination, in 2004), and then to work in television news at MSNBC and, ultimately, to her own show, which began airing in 2008.
When I went to observe Maddow doing her broadcast, at MSNBC’s headquarters, in Rockefeller Center, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was unprepared for the large, eerily silent studio, some of whose props I recognized from watching the show—the desk with the glass top, the garish views of Manhattan skyscrapers. At five minutes to nine, the studio was empty except for me and a young man who had come to bring me earphones. At four minutes to nine, a calm young woman appeared and adjusted the large cameras that faced the desk. At a few seconds before nine, Maddow rushed in and sat down at the desk. She performed her long opening segment. During commercials, she typed furiously on a small computer. Watching her performance at home can be an exhilarating experience. Watching it in the studio was a somewhat flat one. Maddow went through her paces, but they were paces. A few days later, I visited a room—called the control room—a floor below the broadcasting studio, where seven people sit in front of futuristic-looking computers and carry out the work of illustrating Maddow’s commentary with photographs, videos, and writings. They all seem to know what they are doing, but they do not seem relaxed. Things can go wrong, and they sometimes do. The wrong illustration can appear, for example, and Maddow has to react to it with practiced grace and humor.
The hour of the show is the culmination for Maddow of a workday that starts at around 12:30 P.M., when she acquaints herself with the day’s news. At two o’clock, she meets with her staff of twenty young men and women in a room equipped with a whiteboard and two facing rows of identical small desks. The day that I came to a meeting, Maddow arrived ten minutes after the hour, dressed in jeans and a black sweater. She stood in front of the whiteboard, which displayed a list of possible subjects for the show. An elliptical exchange about the various items followed. Maddow would ask a question, and someone would answer. She was informing herself about the possible stories. By the time of the meeting, “I have a pretty good idea of at least what is in contention for making the show that night. I already have two or three ideas. But by the end of the meeting I’ve usually changed my mind,” she said. “It’s a grumpy meeting. A little testy.” I noticed none of this at the meeting I attended; I just found it hard to follow.
“Do you start writing your text after the meeting?” I asked.
“No. I start reading. I read far too long after the meeting. I know what will be in the show, but I haven’t read enough detail, and I don’t start writing until it’s too late.”
“What time do you start writing?”
“I should start writing at four-thirty. Sometimes I don’t start writing until six-thirty.”
I told her how impressed I was that she can write her substantial monologue in such a short time.
“It’s a bad process. It’s impressive in one way, but it’s—reckless. It kills my poor staff. They’re so supportive and constructive. But it’s too much to ask. They need to put in all the visual elements and do the fact-checking and get it into the teleprompter. It’s a produced thing and requires everybody to do everything fast. And it’s a broken process. If I could just get it done an hour earlier, I think I would put ten years back in the lives of all the people who work with me.”
snip//
Maddow’s excitement about 2017 has died down. She is as disarming and funny as ever, but sometimes the gaiety seems a little forced. Here and there she is magnificent. In a show on June 30th, which could be called “An Essay on Disgust,” she lashed out at Donald Trump as she had never done before. The occasion was Trump’s distasteful attack on two MSNBC commentators, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Maddow set up her argument by talking about the political tool of distraction. Typically, a politician who wants to divert attention from a subject he prefers the public not be overly interested in will introduce another subject that will act the way a glittering toy acts on a susceptible baby. But Trump, she said, “doesn’t just merely distract people, he disgusts people. He breaks the bounds of decency. Breaks the bounds of what people generally agree are the moral rules for engagement in public discourse.” The extremity of Trump’s offensiveness forces us to take the bait, to “weigh in as being opposed to this vile thing. . . . With a normal politician’s normal political distraction, almost all of us will just observe it, right? We’re either distracted by it or we’re not. This guy’s strategy, though, it is really different. It’s to sort of tap on the glass of your moral compass—‘Is this thing on?’ To try to make you feel implicated by your silence.” She went on to speak of the damage Trump does with his “nuclear version of a conventional political tactic.” She said, “The thing he damages is something he neither owns nor particularly values, in the abstract, at least. The thing he hurts is the Presidency and by extension the standing of the United States of America.”
Reading the text of the essay is a lesser experience than watching Maddow deliver it on the air. Its logic is a bit insecure, and it is repetitive. But during the broadcast you felt only the force of Maddow’s moral conviction. She is no longer a practicing Catholic, but she has a religious temperament. “I grew up in a believing Catholic home and that has stuck with me,” she told me. “I believe in God, and I probably consider myself Catholic. And I think that in the most basic sense we have to account for our lives once they are done. I don’t have a cartoonist’s picture of Heaven that governs my actions, but I do think you have to make a case for yourself.” This was part of her answer to a question I asked about a commencement speech that she gave at Smith College, in 2010, in which she characterized the saloon-smashing prohibitionist Carrie Nation as “an American huckster, just promoting herself,” who had done the country irreparable harm. She counselled the students to seek glory—the glory of making selfless ethical choices—not fame. That her own quest for glory has brought fame in its wake may be a paradox that occasionally strikes her, but does not put her into a state of high shpilkes. ♦
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hope people read this article and see her process, such as it is. 