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Rachel Maddow at the TCA Winter Press Tour

Out political talk show host Rachel Maddow was on an MSNBC panel at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour last week, fielding questions about her show, what she’s learned since it launched, and what this inauguration day means to her. AfterElton.com‘s Michael Jensen reported back to us, and we’ve excerpted some of the most interesting portions for you.

First, MSNBC President Phil Griffin responded to questions about the origin of The Rachel Maddow Show.

“We made a decision right prior to the conventions to take a little bit of a risk,” said Griffin. “Rachel had been filling in for Olbermann that summer [which was] the first time she ever read a teleprompter … Nobody had kept Keith’s numbers when Keith took a day off, because that show is so uniquely Keith. But Rachel did. And after we saw that, it was pretty clear that Rachel would get an audience after Keith.”

So, Griffin said, “we put in Rachel after the conventions, and everything changed.”

For the first time in MSNBC history, we had a show that was getting big numbers at 9 o’clock. We had a show that was beating, for the first time in 12 and a half years, Larry King. It sort of built the whole network, made it feel bigger. Chris Matthews, Keith, Rachel were all starting to beat CNN in primetime.

We had a terrific election, and since then we’ve continued to beat CNN. This has been an extraordinary time for MSNBC. Rachel’s been a critical piece to it. She’s not only one of the hardest-working people I know. She’s not only one of the smartest, but she’s certainly one of the most delightful and one of the best on TV.

Maddow called her show “a very fun trip up a very steep learning curve … really hard work, and … the best job I’ve ever had by a mile.”

When asked to elaborate on what she’s learned since jumping to TV, Maddow cited the visual cues on the show (maps, graphics, B-roll, videotape etc.) as an example of a skill she’s still trying to master:

Because I come from a radio place, I’m not cued into the idea that I need to be thinking about what else we are broadcasting besides my voice when I’m reading script that I have written. And so I’m not, every day, at a point – I haven’t mastered my time management and my delegation skills well enough so that I’ve got something to do with everything that we’re doing visually every day. And I’ve just got to figure out a way to organize myself better so that I can feel confident that that all reflects my editorial vision as – as much as my script does.

Griffin, who noted “it’s always a little scary when you get a huge audience on day one,” believes Maddow is successful despite learning on the job because she “has a natural sense of communication. And it’s not TV skills. It’s communication skills, and she’s got it.”

Griffin deflected a question about whether Maddow “has put a more likeable face on progressivism,” or whether it was just the right time for a progressive face to emerge, but expanded on Maddow’s talents:

I think her strength is that she takes all this stuff very seriously, and yet she doesn’t take herself seriously. I mean – and I think that’s her strength. You know, she is so smart, but she enjoys it. She’s the only person I know on any news program that will say “dork” and “Obama” in the same sentence and pull it off and still be the smartest person talking on TV. I just think that she has a delightful way. I think it’s a little bit different. I think she’s a fresh voice.

You know, I know that she doesn’t come out of this mix, especially television, and I think that has given her sort of a fresh take. She – she comes as she is. She’s organic to who she is, and I really believe that that’s her success.

But what’s going to happen to The Rachel Maddow Show, one reporter wondered, “without the Bush Administration to kick around? And specifically, he wanted to know, what’s going to happen with the quack-itude segment?”

Maddow isn’t worried about running out of ideas:

I don’t think we are at risk of idiocy going out of fashion in Washington. So wherever there are bad ideas, I will find ways to make fun of them. And sometimes, that’s going to be bad democratic ideas; it’s going to be bad republican ideas; it’s just going to be bad ideas. So I don’t worry about not having George Bush to beat up on anymore.

We’ve been on the air since September 8th. And as we’ve gone further along and gotten further from the election, beating up on George Bush now feels like I’d rather not to a certain extent. We committed to it with the quack-itude lame duck segment.

We thought about a few different things for replacing that with a different sort of franchise. There’s a few different ideas in the hopper. I don’t really want to tell you what they might be, because we haven’t decided yet.

But I think you are going to see some sort of franchise probably with a semi-sophomoric sound effect in that position on the show, replacing the lame duck watch.

A reporter commented to Maddow that “one of the most refreshing things about your show is the fact that it’s bluster-free” and asked whether there has been a time — when someone she’s interviewing has “veered off script and started insulting you or TV news in general” — that she’s had to rein herself in.

She was also asked what she thinks of political talk shows that encourage this sort of rancorous dialogue.

After commenting that “I can’t speak too much to what it is like to experience other people’s shows as a viewer because I don’t watch much TV,” Maddow said, “I do know what it was like to be a guest on other people’s shows where, for a very long time, I was in the wilderness, where it was – I was Punch and they were also booking Judy, or I was Judy and they were also booking Punch. And it didn’t really matter what we were talking about, as long as we were going to fight.”

She described this kind of discourse as “boxing, masquerading as news,” noting, “sometimes I was good at it, and sometimes I wasn’t, and sometimes it was demoralizing, and sometimes it was fun.”

But it was a style she definitely didn’t want to emulate on her own show:

When it became even remotely possible that I might be able to host, I knew that I would not pay that forward, that I would not be hosting “Punch and Judy” shows at all. Plenty of places to get it. It’s not going to die. There’s a reason people book it that way. A – it’s very easy. B – the host has no real role, so they can relax and have a smoke. And C – it does actually – kinetic activity does draw eyeballs.

I don’t learn anything from that process. I don’t – sometimes you learn how to argue well, but that’s kind of it. And I honestly sort of want to learn something. I want to have there be a reason that we’ve taken up that time on this precious broadcast medium that we’ve got. So I don’t host that.

I certainly have give-and-take with my guests, but it’s going to be one-on-one. It’s going to be civil. I’m not going to tell anybody to shut up unless they say something about my mom or something else that I can’t control myself about. But other than that, it’s the way that I – it’s the way that I want to take in information.

She was also asked whether she plans on her show to focus on accountability and the past, or just current political events.

Maddow wants to cover a mix of both:

…I think accountability stories matter. I think that political drama, obviously, continues to matter. But moving forward, I mean, I’m really, really, really invested and interested in national security and military issues.

I think that with Hillary Clinton at the State Department, I think we’re entering an era of diplomacy after an entire generation of almost militarism in terms of prioritizing military responses to our – the way that we’ve tackled issues around the world. I mean, even our disaster aid is now provided by our Navy instead of being provided by USAID.

So issues like that about how America is changing, how we try to get what we want in the world, some of that stuff does – we do have to look back in order to understand it. And I think that when you let stuff go, you’re not necessarily effectively saying it can’t happen again.

With the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama rapidly approaching, reporters were curious about MSNBC’s plans for the event, and Maddow’s involvement.

On Tuesday, Maddow joins Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and Gene Robinson in a “sort of four-person anchor set-up” on the Mall, Maddow stated, with David Gregory reporting from the field near President Obama.

“I’m going to be part of not the play-by-play,” Maddow added, “but the color.”

When asked about what the day means to her, Maddow was thoughtful:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and we’ve been so involved in the not just the 24-hour news cycle, but the 20-minute news cycle at this point, all of the details.

I had the opportunity to meet with Obama yesterday morning, and I realized that when I was prepping questions and things to talk to him about at that meeting, that I was getting – I was getting really, really, really granular, like “Your appointment for the deputy undersecretary of policy and the blah, blah, blah.”

I realized that sometimes I’m getting so close to this that I’ve stopped paying attention to what these big moments mean. And for the inauguration, honestly, I – it goes back to the historic nature of this transformation.

It’s not about the economic crisis that we’re in. It’s not about the two wars that we’re in. It’s not about who else was involved in this election or what administration he is succeeding.

What this inauguration means is that in front of a White House that was built with slave labor in an inaugural week that starts at the Lincoln Memorial, where the second inaugural address is etched into the wall, which is about our country shedding a drop of blood by the sword for every drop of blood that was drawn by the lash, in this country, we are electing an African-American president.

It’s – you couldn’t script it for Hollywood … with everything else that’s going on, I think that, for me, is the thing that is most important about this day. And it’s the thing that we have to come up with a way to express the gravity of.

MSNBC’s live inauguration day coverage begins at 10am EST/7am PST on Tuesday, Jan. 20. The Rachel Maddow Show airs weeknights at 9pm EST/PST.

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