Rachel Maddow Show Mini Review

Image from source (believe it or not), NewsBusters

Rachel Maddow has been a mainstay here on the blog for most of its history. I've heaped superlatives on her so many times, that I won't go into that too much here. But I wanted to at least say something about her new show, now that it has aired on MSNBC for the last two days.

Clearly, The Rachel Maddow Show is being marketed as something of a spin-off of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which is unusual in the world of cable news. He's been there for the hand-off on both episodes, and she has in turn appeared in the last segment of his show. They have an obvious respect for each other, and the interplay is natural. More so than when Olbermann used to throw to Joe Scarborough, to be sure. And infinitely more so than the days when he had to introduce the hideous Rita Cosby.

As fate would have it, Olbermann interviewed Barack Obama this week, so MSNBC is clearly pushing for extra coverage. Thus, Olbermann's presence on Maddow's show has been higher than it likely will be. But Maddow does not suffer from the long shadow cast by Olbermann. She hasn't lost any of her personality, interacts very well so far with each guest, and has approached the stories from a different angle than most other TV talking heads.

It's too early to give a rave review. I'm sure there are kinks to work out, probably segments to shuffle and tweak. Kent Jones doesn't play as well on TV as he did on radio, but he might grow into his portion of the show as well. But TRMS will have a place on my schedule for quite a while, and even after only two days is my second favorite show in all of cable news. It's better than its predecessor, The Verdict with Dan Abrams, better than recent time slot holder, Scarborough Country, and infinitely better than who had the slot a couple of years ago: Rita Cosby, Live and Direct!

Not everybody feels the way I do, as the excerpt below shows. The only reason I'm linking to it is to show how ridiculous the right-wing blogosphere is. Newsbusters is sometimes quoted as though it is a real news source, but it isn't really. Take this story, where Rachel Maddow is derided as "hard-left Air America host" and "radical-left lesbian." Maddow in actuality is left wing, but not radical or hard-left. She is a lesbian, and you will find very few right-wing write ups that ignore that. I'll let you check out FreeRepublic.com yourself to see just how nasty they get on that subject.

[Excerpt]

MSNBC's Newest Leftist Face: 'Affable and Erudite'?

On Monday, The Boston Globe greeted the debut of hard-left Air America host Rachel Maddow’s new show on MSNBC with a bouquet of praise. She’s not only "a key face of the new, feisty, ratings-boosted [?] MSNBC," she’s "affable and erudite," she’s "cripplingly patriotic" and has a "yen for national-security issues." MSNBC brass added she "often isn’t expressing an opinion as much as laying out facts," and claimed MSNBC is a brand for "high-powered intellects...an appetite for really smart discussion of the news. . ."

Read more (if you really want to) at: Newsbusters