Rachel Maddow is breaking ground every day as the first openly lesbian “non-babe” to have her own cable news show on prime time. She is such a huge success that she’s even beating Larry King Live on the ratings almost every night. Literally, she is living proof that “common sense” about what is supposed to get ratings is NOT necessarily actual common sense. Here’s a recent appearance that she had on The View daytime TV show:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjZmErjFhK4]
Catch her show on MSNBC weeknights:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/
Here’s more background on her:
“Gay for Rachel Maddow”: What a Hot, Smart, Lesbian Pundit Means for an Uneasy America
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Cable news isn’t the most female-friendly or queer-friendly place. As a whole, it is Middle America; Maddow is more Middlesex.
When the Rachel Maddow Show debuted on MSNBC back in September 2008, not many people knew her now-famous story. They were not aware that this impish, handsome figure with a sideways grin, a scholar’s brain, and a lawyer’s logic was a Rhodes scholar, former activist, and open lesbian. It was fun, that first week, watching as she nimbly dismantled right-wing arguments without raising her voice. Maddow’s affable goofy-geek persona, her ability to skewer other pundits’ arguments without coming off like an asshole, and her genius flair for translating policy arguments into interesting, digestible bites charmed the pants off a lefty populace that had been lusting for a cable-news rock star all its own since … well, since the invention of cable news. It was a good debut.
Then, all of a sudden, that shit blew up. Maddow started whipping Larry King’s anorexic tail in the ratings. She more than doubled MSNBC’s viewership for her time slot, from 800,000 to about 1.7 million. She almost single-handedly made MSNBC — for years the loser third wheel of the cable-news party — a player. And, best of all, she started handing Pat Buchanan his ass almost every night. Suddenly, the nation couldn’t get enough of this 6-foot-tall dyke who put douchey white men in their place on a regular basis.
To read the rest of this story on Rachel Maddow, go to: