Liberal, Smarter and Quickest

Rachel Maddow is quick-witted and clever, funny and cruel, sarcastic and biased. Neutral journalism? That’s obsolete.

Every evening during prime time, the Rachel Maddow Show inveighs against the Republicans and their number one candidate, Mitt Romney. Or more accurately, Rachel Maddow rips her opponents to shreds on the air; she dismembers them one limb at a time. If Barack Obama is reelected, it will be largely thanks to her.

The news channel MSNBC, which broadcasts the Rachel Maddow Show, has functioned for several years now as a liberal response to the conservative Fox News channel.

CNN has essentially fallen by the wayside in this partisan competition; its insistence on objectivity and allowing the audience to draw its own conclusions is considered too boring.

The undisputed star since the end of the 1990s at Fox News is Bill O’Reilly. He was responsible for the introduction of a new concept to America’s evening television lineup — the news show. A news show is designed to simply produce heat rather than light; to entertain rather than to inform. Guests are invited in and quickly get the stuffing beaten out of them. Rhetorical fireworks are prized above good arguments; the motto is: Attack! The political opponents notoriously play with the truth, cover up the facts and have no morals. That’s the kind of thigh-slapping journalism that produces headlines.

That’s the concept MSNBC copied from Fox. In Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly seems to have met his match. She may lack his gravitas, but the attractive Californian more than makes up for it with razor-sharp polemics.

She was influenced early on by multiculturalism and morality — her father’s side of the family originated in Russia and Holland, and her mother’s heritage was English and Irish — both sides, according to Maddow, very strict Catholic. She attended prestigious Stanford University, where the student newspaper outed her as a homosexual. Shortly thereafter, she became — as she says — the first admitted American homosexual to attend Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship in 1995. There, six years later, she received her Ph.D. in political science. Her dissertation was titled “HIV/Aids and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons.”

Maddow’s subsequent rise in the media world was meteoric. She began in radio but was quickly discovered as a political commentator for television. The Rachel Maddow Show was first aired by MSNBC on September 8, 2008. Her audience doubled within one month. She is especially favored by the sought-after youth audience that apparently likes her provocative style.

MSNBC has become Fox News’s “liberal evil twin,” says the New York Times. When both networks report on the same event, such as the party conventions, there is scarcely any information overlap. They either rejoice in the opposition’s blunders or cheer their home teams. There’s rarely, if ever, any convergence.

Rachel Maddow is the secular goddess of one of them. Both are fervently looking for the knock-out punch, that haymaker that rhetorically puts the other side down for the count. That longing is perhaps the last thing liberals and conservatives in America still have in common.