longreads: On what drives the MSNBC star, and how she’s attempted to move her show beyond partisan shouting: Back in 2008, shortly after Phil Griffin called Maddow and told her he was giving her a prime-time television show of her own, she inherited the staff of Verdict With Dan Abrams, a show that embodied the gimmicky emptiness Maddow detests. The Sunday night before her first show, her executive producer, Bill Wolff, threw a launch party at his apartment and invited the entire Verdict staff. When everyone was sufficiently liquored up, Maddow gave a speech. ‘The point was to get everyone excited,’ Wolff recalls. ‘“OK, go get ‘em, let’s go do this.”’ What Maddow told them, instead, was that they needed to forget everything they had ever learned – that this show would be completely different from the one they’d been working on, that they must forget all of the skills they’d spent their careers building. “Rachel Maddow’s Quiet War.” — Ben Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone One of my idols.
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longreads:

On what drives the MSNBC star, and how she’s attempted to move her show beyond partisan shouting:

Back in 2008, shortly after Phil Griffin called Maddow and told her he was giving her a prime-time television show of her own, she inherited the staff of Verdict With Dan Abrams, a show that embodied the gimmicky emptiness Maddow detests. The Sunday night before her first show, her executive producer, Bill Wolff, threw a launch party at his apartment and invited the entire Verdict staff. When everyone was sufficiently liquored up, Maddow gave a speech. ‘The point was to get everyone excited,’ Wolff recalls. ‘“OK, go get ‘em, let’s go do this.”’ What Maddow told them, instead, was that they needed to forget everything they had ever learned – that this show would be completely different from the one they’d been working on, that they must forget all of the skills they’d spent their careers building.

“Rachel Maddow’s Quiet War.” — Ben Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone

One of my idols.

(via longreads)

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  1. jassis1228 reblogged this from longreads
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    I ask her why she is so hard on herself. “My reaction to that is to say, ‘Oh, another bad thing about myself is that...
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    Maddow suffers, she says, from “cyclical” depression. “One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my...
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  10. urbanbamboo reblogged this from longreads and added:
    One of my idols.
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  13. This was featured in #Long Reads
  14. metaphork said: life beyond partisan shouting…..too far out there to get anybody to listen…….
  15. charliewarzel reblogged this from longreads and added:
    So, Maddow gave the exact same speech as Emily Mortimer in The Newsroom?…
  16. longreads posted this