Inside Rachel Maddow’s Plans to Reinvent Her MSNBC Show in Trump Era

I guess she'll take up an adversarial stance toward Trump. Will she have more access to Trump officials? Will she have more influence on cable now the Megyn Kelly is at NBC?

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/rachel-maddow-donald-trump-msnbc-1201960902/

Inside Rachel Maddow’s Plans to Reinvent Her MSNBC Show in Trump Era

Senior TV Editor
Brian Steinberg
Senior TV Editor
@bristei
rachel maddowMIKE MCGREGOR FOR VARIETY
JANUARY 17, 2017 | 06:40AM PT
Even the busy Rachel Maddow has the right to expect the first week back from a holiday break to be an easy one. But in the current news cycle, easy is hard.

This story first appeared in the January 17, 2017 issue of Variety. Subscribe today.
In a rare maneuver for a cable-news host who rarely books big-name guests in advance, her MSNBC staff had locked in Sen. Bernie Sanders for a three-segment interview on Jan. 2. With an hour and 15 minutes before “The Rachel Maddow Show” was set to air that day, producers discovered that the influential politician could not make it. Maddow had to rely on extra material her team had produced to fill the time. The next day, she journeyed to Washington, D.C., for back-to-back segments with Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, and Sanders, in a make-up for the previous night. On Thursday Jan. 5, she led with a look at how the National Enquirer mirrors current politics; the segment used so many on-screen elements, she joked, “I almost killed my graphics team!” On Friday, the capper: an analysis of President-elect Donald Trump’s downplaying of a much-scrutinized intelligence report stating in clear terms that Russia had influenced the U.S. presidential election. “I have to say, I don’t get weirded out by that much stuff in the news, but this kind of puts a shiver down my spine,” Maddow told viewers. “Our president-elect is lying to us.”


She doesn’t want any rest. “I’m more energized about my job now than I have been in a very long time,” she says in a recent interview. “I see my job as explaining stuff. Boy, there’s a lot to explain.”

With the election of Trump, Maddow is ready to embrace a new tactic that could be an immense challenge for her. Though she acknowledges that she has faced hurdles in luring top politicos to her show, she wants to land the big players in this new and difficult-to-read political epoch for interviews that could extend for 30 to 45 minutes. If senators, policymakers, and White House machers can go toe-to-toe with the anchor, so the theory goes, they will be rewarded with something significantly more valuable than a sound bite, the usual coin of the cable-news realm.

“I don’t pretend to be anybody other than who I am.”
RACHEL MADDOW
Maddow won’t be leaving behind the reporting and commentary that made her famous. Since she launched her program on MSNBC in the fall of 2008, she has established herself as a sort of news raconteur. She immerses herself in the wonky details of whatever she may be examining — a river in North Carolina polluted by Duke Energy coal ash, for example — then weaves those granular bits into a colorful tale of national import, one she often tells in a mammoth 20-minute opening segment. So reliant is her program on her investigations and storytelling that it has typically had little use for the talking heads who tend to populate so much of the cable-news landscape.

“I do feel like where I do best, and what our audience seems to respond to the most, is expository work, explanatory work, putting things in context,” she says. “When I can get interviews with people who are in positions of authority, people who are decision-makers and players in this new political era that we are in, I hope I can have a conversation with them and press them so that they talk about things they would not necessarily talk about in other places.”

While she is open that her politics are liberal, she says her news delivery is not: “I’m just doing my job. I don’t pretend to be anybody other than who I am, and I’m telling you what I think is going on in the world. Whether or not that appeals to you is sort of your call.”

She points to two interviews she conducted with senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway in recent weeks. The exchanges were never impolite, but they were certainly tough. In a late-December interview, Maddow appeared to school the presidential counselor in the nuclear-arms race. She also prompted Conway to acknowledge that the Trump transition team had reached out to ABC News after the president-elect suggested that journalist Martha Raddatz had broken out in tears on TV upon learning of his election — a false assertion.

“I actually have high hopes for the willingness of this new administration to put people out to talk,” says Maddow. “I’ve had Kellyanne Conway doing very long — very intense, at times -— interviews with me. I give her credit for coming back and doing a second one after the first.”


PRE-SHOW PREP: Maddow conducts meticulous research for her self-described job of “explaining stuff.”
MIKE MCGREGOR FOR VARIETY
Of course, she wants to talk to Trump, whose team, she says, brought up the idea of an interview a few times in the recent past. What would she ask him? “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” She’d also like to land Hillary Clinton and learn her future plans.