The Transformation Of Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow is a familiar face to cable news viewers, particularly those who gravitate toward MSNBC. Described by Rolling Stone as "America's leading lefty wonk," Maddow has created a singular niche within television news, programming that entertains and informs while also taking viewers on deep dives into various topics that other news reporting typically will only scratch the surface of. Even those who aren't familiar with her work are still aware of her — at least to a degree. "Every once in a while, somebody at a bus stop or a taxi driver will be like, 'Do I know you from somewhere?' They can't quite place me. I always say I'm Anderson Cooper, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't," Maddow joked when interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

Before her ascent to TV journalism fame and the staggering net worth that resulted from it, Maddow wore a lot of hats, ranging from grad student to AIDS activist to sidekick on a radio morning show. Her journey to television screens has been as unlikely as it is fascinating.

Even as a youngster, future MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow was a news junkie. When she was just 4 years old, Maddow's mom would often walk in to the kitchen and find her kid reading the newspaper. "She was born grown-up. She never talked baby talk," her mother, Elaine Maddow, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay area, Rachel gravitated toward sports — primarily basketball, volleyball, and swimming. As a teenager, she dreamed of one day competing in the Olympics but saw those aspirations evaporate when she suffered a severe shoulder injury while playing volleyball during her senior year of high school. "I was a good athlete," Maddow told The New Yorker, revealing she was being scouted by several colleges at the time. "When I hurt my shoulder, I had to decide whether to get it fixed so I could go on being an athlete, or not." Realizing that undergoing surgery would force her to delay her plans to go to college by a year, she decided against going under the knife. "I graduated from the local high school at seventeen and went to Stanford," she said.

It's fair to say that 17-year-old Rachel Maddow blossomed at Stanford, in more ways than one. "Around this time I was realizing I was gay. I was coming out to myself," she told The New Yorker. Shocked by the rampant homophobia she encountered on campus, she decided to put up posters in her dorm announcing that she was a lesbian. The stunt attracted the attention of the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily. "It was empowering," Maddow told the newspaper of the outpouring of support she'd received. "There was a posse of people behind me."

That newspaper report, however, wound up having major ramifications in her personal life when a copy was anonymously mailed to her conservative, staunchly religious parents — to whom she had yet to come out. "They would have had a hard time with me coming out anyway, but this was a particularly nasty way for them to find out," Maddow told The Daily Beast, admitting they took the news hard. "They were shocked and upset and hurt," she said. These feelings were only compounded by learning about their daughter's sexuality secondhand from a newspaper. "It took a while for them to get over it," Maddow admitted.

Anyone who's ever watched Rachel Maddow's show-opening monologues will not be surprised to learn that she was a top student. In 1995, The Stanford Daily reported that Maddow became the first Stanford student in a decade to win both the Rhodes scholarship and the Marshall scholarship. Maddow, described by the newspaper as a "radical lesbian," said she didn't envision a traditional career path for herself. "I was very clear to the judges that I'm not going to be a politician or a lawyer or working for the government," she said.

Her professors at Stanford still remember her as one of the brightest pupils they'd ever seen. "She was a brilliant student, one of those that only come around every few years or so," Roger Noll, former director of Stanford's Public Policy Program, told New York magazine. She went on to attend England's Oxford University; when her money dried up, she moved to Massachusetts to complete her doctoral dissertation. 

While Rachel Maddow was finishing her dissertation in Massachusetts, she struggled financilaly. "I remember applying to a video store — this was when we still had video stores! — and not getting a job," she recalled when interviewed by CBS News' "Sunday Morning." Thankfully, she did find employment. She told The Guardian, "I was a waitress, bike messenger, bucket washer at a coffee bean factory, yard help, landscaping laborer, handyman."

In 1999, she was hired to do some yard work for Susan Mikula, a successful photographer whose work has been showcased throughout the U.S. "I drove out there, she answered the door, and it was love at first sight," Maddow said of the way she met her partner. There were however, some complications that presented themselves at the outset. Not only is Mikula 15 years Maddow's senior, both were involved with other people at the time. Adding to the obstacles was the fact that Maddow had never been in, or even wanted to be in, a monogamous relationship. "But this was different," Maddow added. "We both had to extricate ourselves from other things. Fortunately it was mutual."

Their first date was unconventional, with the two visiting a firing range to shoot guns. They've been together ever since.

While living in Massachusetts, Rachel Maddow was told by friends about a morning radio show that was holding open on-air auditions to find a new "news girl." As Maddow recalled on "The Howard Stern Show," "My friends dared me to do it." Despite having zero radio experience and having never heard the show, Maddow gave the competition a shot. Against all odds, she got the job as co-host of "Dave in the Morning." She told Southern Voice, "They hired me on the spot. Radio came to me, I didn't come to it." 

Maddow was under no illusion that she got the gig because of her skills or talent. "They hired me because I had a nice voice and I was willing to get up that early for minimum wage," she told The Hollywood Reporter. When it turned out that she was really good at radio — and actually enjoyed doing it — nobody was more surprised than Maddow. 

Eventually, she quit "Dave in the Morning" to focus on finishing up her doctoral dissertation. "I left the radio job and thought that would be it," she explained in an interview with Berkshire Magazine. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place, however, Maddow felt she had something to offer as an on-air presence and began contacting radio stations throughout western Massachusetts offering to take on shifts. "I thought I could be helpful," she added. "That's how I got back into radio."

Rachel Maddow gained experience in the world of radio, and her career took a big leap when she was hired to join the newly launched Air America network in 2004. Initially, she co-hosted "Unfiltered" for the left-leaning radio network, alongside writer Liz Winstead (aka the creator of "The Daily Show") and Chuck D, founding member of legendary rap group Public Enemy. "We're not just waging a battle," Maddow told Southern Voice at the time. "We're competing for ratings."

With Maddow's star on the rise, she was subsequently tapped to host her own radio project, "The Rachel Maddow Show." Maddow's show built a following, evident when Air America announced in 2009 that her contract was being renewed. "As millions of Americans now know, Rachel has become a breakout star and our affiliates and listeners will continue to benefit from her wit, intelligence and insight," declared Air America's Bill Hess in a statement.

In the years that followed, Maddow remained a mainstay on Air America. Her association with the network ended in 2010 when it ceased operations after several years of financial struggles. 

As one of talk radio's brightest stars, the next step for Rachel Maddow was television. An opportunity to make the leap from radio to TV arrived in 2005, when Tucker Carlson, known best as the controversial former Fox News firebrand, began hosting his own show for the then-fledgling cable news network MSNBC, with Maddow appearing regularly as a panelist. 

”My goals for doing this are to (a) have a good time, (b) speak my honest mind about the topics at hand, which has the added benefit of bringing an unabashedly lefty perspective to at least one cable news show," she told the Daily Hampshire Gazette of what she hoped to accomplish. "The Tucker debut last night was a hoot — really, I think the show is set up in a way that's meant to be fun for those of us on the set, and so far it's working," she added.

That gig led her to appear on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," where host Olbermann served as her Obi-wan Kenobi, mentoring her in the ways of television. So impressed was he with Maddow that he pushed his MSNBC bosses to let her fill in for him when he was off. She agreed to give it a try — but only on the condition that he taught her how to use a teleprompter. "She had clearly mastered it in 10 minutes," Olbermann told the The Kansas City Star.

In September 2008, MSNBC execs set up Rachel Maddow with her own primetime program, "The Rachel Maddow Show," airing immediately after "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Maddow was mystified by her sudden rise through the ranks of cable news. "I don't honestly know why MSNBC hired me. I guess we got good ratings. We didn't suck," she told The Guardian. She'd also made peace with the fact that she was required to wear makeup and chicer clothes on national television. "I don't think very much about my appearance and when I do it's not, how would you say ... strategic," she said with a laugh. "But it's a visual medium and it really does matter what you look like."

Much as she'd fallen into a successful career in radio, Maddow proved to be a natural on television — despite having no formal training, nor any prior inclination to appear on camera. "Television wasn't part of a master plan," she admitted in an interview with the New York Daily News. "But once I did it, I knew I wanted to do more." 

That said, Maddow has admitted that the medium of television was more of a means to an end than the end in and of itself. "I don't value a TV show for the sake of having a TV show," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "The idea was to do something cool with a platform that reaches a lot of people."

Not only did Rachel Maddow's lack of television experience and journalism training make her stardom in the world of cable news unlikely, so too did the simple fact that she'd been openly gay since her teens. When the first episode of "The Rachel Maddow Show" went live on MSNBC in 2008, Maddow made history as the first-ever out lesbian to anchor a TV news show. "It's a very small glass ceiling I've broken," she joked to Mother Jones.

Maddow is well aware that she's far from the typical woman behind a news anchor desk. "I'm a big lesbian who looks like a man. I am not, like, Anchor Babe, and I'm never gonna be," she said during an interview with GQ. Despite being proud of her sexual identity, Maddow has refused to let it dictate the content of her show. "I don't think about it that much," Maddow told Slate of how her sexuality may or may not influence the topics she decides to discuss. Then again, she also admitted that she had no frame of reference. "I don't know what it would be like to be doing this show as a straight person ... but I feel like gay rights issues get essentially considered like all others," she added.

While left-leaning former ESPN host Keith Olbermann would seem to be ideologically suited to be Rachel Maddow's mentor, the same cannot be said for Roger Ailes. Ailes, who died in 2017, was the architect of Fox News, the right-wing cable news channel propagating a political worldview diametrically opposed to Maddow's.

Nevertheless, Maddow confirmed that Ailes played a big part in helping her shape her early career at MSNBC. As she revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair, she'd struck up a friendship with Ailes that she compared to the sporting rivalry between baseball players on opposing teams; just because one player is playing against another doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned from that competition. "There's a sort of, like, respecting the game, in terms of people who are doing well and people who are good at it," she explained. "I mean that was the basis of my professional friendship with Roger Ailes. I wanted tips from him about how to be better on TV. And he was willing to talk to me about what I was doing well, and doing poorly, to help me get better."

Ever since the onset of puberty, Rachel Maddow had experienced bouts of depression. "It's manageable. But it's real," she told NPR's "Fresh Air" in 2012, explaining that depression had impacted her life in subtle ways. Working, she explained, offered some respite but didn't really address the root cause. "It's really a chemical thing," she said. "You get adrenaline from work, but adrenaline is not a cure."

Her struggle with depression was something that she'd always kept to herself, until deciding to open about her mental health in interviews such as that one. "It was a hard call," she told The New Yorker of her reticence to go public with her depression. "Because it is nobody's business," she added. "But it had been helpful to me to learn about the people who were surviving, were leading good lives, even though they were dealing with depression. So I felt it was a bit of a responsibility to pay that back."

Given Rachel Maddow's academic background, it wasn't too surprising to see her become an author. Her first book, "Drift: The Unmooring of Military Power," was published in 2012. Her next took almost a decade to arrive: The 2020 tome about Richard Nixon's veep, Spiro Agnew, titled "Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House," which was followed by 2021's "Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth," and then "Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism" in 2023. Interestingly, "Blowout" brought her arguably the most unexpected honor in her career, as she won a Grammy Award in the Spoken Word Album category for the audiobook version.

The same year "Drift" was published, Maddow also took her writing skills to The Washington Post," writing op-eds on the war in Afghanistan and birth control. In 2013, she signed on to write a monthly column for the esteemed newspaper.

In 2018, Maddow topped herself when she became the 15th celebrity to ever create her very own crossword puzzle for The New York Times. "I'm a childless, middle-aged, potbellied lesbian, and I don't have that much to be excited about in my life other than having a great job," she said on her show (via The Advocate). "This is kind of it, like there will never be a baby, but there's this freaking crossword puzzle, and I am very, very excited about it!"

In early 2018, Rachel Maddow entered the burgeoning world of podcasting with "Bag Man." At the same time, she also unveiled a related documentary special, "Betrayal." "Both these stories needed a few months of dedicated production time, though, and I wanted to be free to let them stand on their own as historical exposition, without having to overtly tie it into the existing news cycle," Maddow said in an email to Variety.

In 2022, fans were stunned when Maddow announced some massive changes to her talk show. She revealed she would be taking a break from her MSNBC show — and for a rather exciting reason: to focus on actor/director Ben Stiller's movie version of "Bag Man." Later that year, MSNBC confirmed that she was scaling back, slated to only appear on "The Rachel Maddow Show" one night each week. 

In late 2022, acclaimed film director Steven Spielberg signed a deal for a movie adaptation of another of her podcasts, "Ultra," with Tony Kushner (the playwright behind Broadway hit "Angels in America") and Danny Strong (whose TV hits include "Empire" and "Billions") set to write the screenplay. With that announcement, it was clear that Maddow had taken on yet another role: media mogul.