Sunday's Washington Post Magazine has a one-page "Just Asking" interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. On the opposing page was an arty photo of Maddow in blue light (for the blue states)? Joe Heim started out with overt flattery:
You have a highly rated nightly news show, your new book, Blowout, was a bestseller and your podcast, “Bag Man,” just won an award. As a journalist, I find all of that success very annoying.
Ha! Points for honesty. Well done.
Why aren’t you exhausted?
I am! I am a catastrophe. I’m [worried] I will have a herniated disc collapse while I’m on the air. And I’m only 46!
Then Heim asked Maddow if Trump has been the president she expected, and she gave the expected lecture:
Yeah, I think so. I didn’t have much awareness of him as a public figure before he was running. But once he was running, given the sort of recurring dynamic in the campaign — where his opponents and observers and the sort of graybeards of our democracy would identify a place where you’re really not supposed to go, and as soon as that was identified, he would instantly go there — I saw that as a template. And so I have sort of expected all along that there really isn’t any line that you can draw in terms of hurting the country or defying the Constitution or defying norms and mores in terms of what we think our civic life is supposed to be. I can’t imagine anything that Trump wouldn’t do. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a line that he wouldn’t cross. And so, yeah, I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.
At least Heim put Maddow's obsession with Russian collusion conspiracies on the table. He asked about it in the most open-ended way possible: "You’ve had critics who say you’re too obsessed with Russia and you see malfeasance in all of Russia’s actions. What’s your response to that?"
I don’t worry about that kind of criticism very much. I don’t really worry about any kind of criticism too much. I don’t have time. I do feel like I was aggressive in covering the Russian interference in our 2016 election. If you go back during the election, like, when the RNC platform toward Ukraine and Russia got changed, I was one of the only people who put that on TV. And when it came to, you know, [Paul] Manafort as a strange addition to a Republican nominee’s campaign, given his previous work for a pro-Kremlin kleptocratic pseudo-dictator who had escaped from office and had escaped to Moscow to avoid the angry mobs in the street, like, I covered that stuff as it was happening. Not more aggressively, but maybe with more interest than other people at the time. And that’s just simply a product of my news judgment.
"News judgment." Like her show is a "news" show.
PS: A question about Fox and MSNBC did not make the magazine, but it's online. Maddow gives the usual spin that MSNBC is so very, very different than that partisan Fox News Channel:
Is it a problem for America that we have large chunks of viewers who won’t watch news channels because they find them either too conservative or too liberal?
I don’t know. I tend to think that the objectivity of the golden age of news is overstated. And I tend to think that the both-sides-ism about, you know, there being TV for liberals and TV for conservatives and that MSNBC is a mirror image of Fox, I think that tends to be overstated as well. I think at MSNBC we are doing a fundamentally different project every day than what Fox News is doing every day. I mean, Fox News was founded by the media consultant to Richard Nixon, who was trying to create a conservative media environment that would boost conservative politics and the Republican Party. And that’s what Fox News is. And that’s their project. And that’s what they became. That’s what they were from the beginning under Roger Ailes. And that’s what they have, you know, accelerated toward, I think, with even less restraint since he died.
So I think it’s a hard question to answer. My role in it is something that I think about all the time. I mean, I want to be proud of my work at the end of the day. I want to be able to be proud of my role as a citizen at the end of the day. Our sort of internal mantra on our show is that we try to increase the amount of useful information in the world. And that means that we have editorial freedom. I have editorial freedom to choose which stories I want to not cover and choose which stories I want to cover. And I get to choose how I cover them within the bounds of NBC News rules and standards. And I ask my viewers to trust me. And when I get stuff wrong I issue corrections. And I try to do my best every day to tell people what I think is the most important thing and why it’s important. And I don’t really know a more ethical or a more civic-minded way to do this job.
