Interview with Rachel Maddow

From the Mother Jones extended interview, January/February 2009 issue:

MJ: Olbermann renegotiated his contract for a reported $7.5 million a year. When do you get to renegotiate?

RM: For $7.5 million? Ha! It remains to be seen whether I’m a flash in the pan. I haven’t been on the air that long, and my initial ratings were great, but I’ve got a lot to prove.

I know I’ve seen enough of her to hope she’ll stick around!

“If you don’t know by now, Rachel Maddow is the world’s most unlikely cable news talk-show host. For one thing, she doesn’t watch TV. And she’s young (35), is a Rhodes scholar with a PhD from Oxford, and is openly gay—an industry first. (More than one friend has told me that her ascent is some consolation for the passage of California’s anti-gay-marriage Prop 8.) But her combination of lefty sensibilities, a hipster vibe, wicked smarts, and genuine good cheer has taken the entire country by storm. She’s made msnbc competitive against cnn’s Larry King for the first time. Existing in the space between Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, Maddow’s hour-long show privileges reporters and actual experts over pundits, real information over blather and fake fights, and comes with healthy sides of sass and sarcasm. It’s a mix she learned at the left-of-center radio network Air America, where she still broadcasts a live show each weekday. In her spare time, Maddow’s writing a book on the role of politics in the US military. In her other spare time, she’s an enthusiast of graphic novels and mixology.”