Last week, two separate reviews cast Rachel Maddow in two starkly different lights: the American Prospect said she was rewriting the rules of cable news while the New York Times wrote that she was not "fresh" and that her program was merely "Countdown" for "viewers down on Keith Olbermann."
This Monday, two more reviews, one from the Los Angeles Times and one from the UK's Guardian. The LAT says Maddow "finds the right formula on MSNBC," while the Guardian writes about the "self-proclaimed butch dyke" who has become the "star of America's cable news."
The LAT review quotes Keith Olbermann, who explains what makes "The Rachel Maddow Show" such an early success while other women on cable news have failed:
"The politics and the familiarity with her are 90% of the equation," said Olbermann, who boosted her profile on his show and lobbied the network to make her a host.
"But you never are just talking to the blog crowd, as loud and as luminous and as loyal as they are," he added. "You have to be able to deliver something."
Olbermann believes that Maddow's popularity is rooted in the fact that she strikes a balance that has eluded many other female hosts, who have historically not fared well on cable.
"There is a different set of standards regarding women and credibility and aggressiveness on the air," he said. "And Rachel manages to keep her credibility and her forcefulness and obviously her intelligence, but there's also just a fundamental likability that really works to her advantage."
Maddow, for her part, told the LAT's Matea Gold that she remains self-conscious about her appearance:
"I thought it was funny to be asked at first," said Maddow, who still hosts a daily Air America show. "Really, me? A face made for radio, if there ever was one. I think I was very self-conscious about being visually presented, and I still am, to a certain extent."
On one side of her still-bare office hang about a dozen suits in varying shades of black and gray, her on-air uniform.
"It is a rainbow of monochrome," acknowledged Maddow, who dresses off-air like a gangly teenager in baggy jeans and sneakers. "I just want to meet a basic threshold of what you're supposed to look like on television so it's not a topic of concern or discussion."
Read the full LAT review here.
The Guardian review more squarely focuses on Maddow's sexuality, pointing out that she was the first openly gay Rhodes Scholar and quoting the NYT review of her "deep, modulating voice." From the Guardian:
'The one time Fox News ever asked me to be a guest,' she told the New York Times, 'was when Madonna made news by kissing another famous female, Britney Spears. They thought I had expertise, maybe. I said, "No, duh".'
Maddow came out as a lesbian when she was just 15. 'You have to learn to survive and prosper in a hostile environment,' she has said. At Stanford University in the early Nineties, a university newspaper noted she was one of only two openly gay freshmen. When a reporter later asked if the other gay freshman was her girlfriend, Maddow said: 'Funnily enough, only one other person was out, and she was not one of the many girls I was sleeping with.' Maddow majored in public policy and became an Aids activist. Winning a Rhodes scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1995, she got her doctorate in political science, studying Aids and prison reform.
When she returned to America to finish her dissertation, she supported herself doing odd jobs, cleaning buckets in a coffee-bean factory and working as a handyman. That's how, in 1999, she met her girlfriend, Susan Mikula, an artist. Mikula had been looking for a 'yard boy' to help out with her house in Massachusetts.