I'm not sure what this entry is doing on IMDb.com, a site I thought dealt with movies and television series like "Law and Order" but -- okay.
MSNBC is decidedly "liberal" in its bias, just as Fox News has become not much more than a promotion of conservative -- not necessarily Republican -- values. Her program is about the only one I depend on for a relatively accurate presentation of one of the liberal perspectives, as well as a critique of the conservative positions. Of the other "opinion journalists" at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann should leave his ego to the Smithsonian. Ed Schulz, with his "hot buttons", is a bag of wind that appears to be MSNBC's mostly closely matched answer to the numbskulls at Fox. Chris Mathews has an irritating habit of interrupting all of his guests, whether he disagrees with them or not, but Mathews' humanitarianism is so fundamental and he himself so spiritually pure that I give him a pass.
I used the term "one of the liberal perspectives" before because "liberal" and "conservative" aren't single pigeon holes into which sometimes dramatically different positions can be dumped. Maddow, for example, has at times been quite critical of President Obama and other Democrats.
Chiefly, I admire Rachel Maddow and her show for two reasons.
(1) She has a D.Phil. from Oxford and the scholar's habit of doing lots of research on a subject, then citing her sources. If she gets something wrong, she says so and apologizes. She uses accurate charts and graphs and explains them in a way that's easily understood, though not oversimplified. She'd make a good professor. Well, in a way, she already is.
(2) Her emotional tonus is stable and its default setting is "slightly cheerful." Claims that she "smirks" tell us more about the claimant than about Maddow. She is unfailingly civil and polite, even on those rare occasions when she's able to book hostile guests. She doesn't bloviate. She doesn't get angry. She may call individuals or political movements "names," the way third-graders might, but she does so rarely -- far less often than her counterparts either on Fox or MSNBC. And to compare her in this regard to Ann Coulter is something of a joke in itself. Coulter has no equal as a purveyor of gossip and smear. She's great at it.
But, as in all such shows, some days are slower than others and sometimes there is considerable repetition, and some of the event threads she follows are less interesting than others, at least to me.
She's about the only talking head on either Fox or MSNBC that I feel I can actually LEARN something from -- aside from the bias of the head itself. I'll just mention one example. A few months ago, Maddow took a walk through the neighborhoods of Baghdad with correspondent Richard Engel. She was the audience's proxy, while Engel explained the people and things they were looking at. The sequence was edited, of course, yet I felt I learned more about Iraq's behavior stream in those segments than I had ever known before. Just for instance, not all Moslems give two hoots about observing the rules about fasting on Ramadan. They're like Christians, with their varying degrees of allegiance to their religion.
I won't go on, except to say that among all the clutter and the glitz and the swooping banners and the breaking news and the electronic percussion and the fanfares of both Fox and MSNBC, her show comes as a big relief. I don't need to reach for the aspirin.
MSNBC is decidedly "liberal" in its bias, just as Fox News has become not much more than a promotion of conservative -- not necessarily Republican -- values. Her program is about the only one I depend on for a relatively accurate presentation of one of the liberal perspectives, as well as a critique of the conservative positions. Of the other "opinion journalists" at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann should leave his ego to the Smithsonian. Ed Schulz, with his "hot buttons", is a bag of wind that appears to be MSNBC's mostly closely matched answer to the numbskulls at Fox. Chris Mathews has an irritating habit of interrupting all of his guests, whether he disagrees with them or not, but Mathews' humanitarianism is so fundamental and he himself so spiritually pure that I give him a pass.
I used the term "one of the liberal perspectives" before because "liberal" and "conservative" aren't single pigeon holes into which sometimes dramatically different positions can be dumped. Maddow, for example, has at times been quite critical of President Obama and other Democrats.
Chiefly, I admire Rachel Maddow and her show for two reasons.
(1) She has a D.Phil. from Oxford and the scholar's habit of doing lots of research on a subject, then citing her sources. If she gets something wrong, she says so and apologizes. She uses accurate charts and graphs and explains them in a way that's easily understood, though not oversimplified. She'd make a good professor. Well, in a way, she already is.
(2) Her emotional tonus is stable and its default setting is "slightly cheerful." Claims that she "smirks" tell us more about the claimant than about Maddow. She is unfailingly civil and polite, even on those rare occasions when she's able to book hostile guests. She doesn't bloviate. She doesn't get angry. She may call individuals or political movements "names," the way third-graders might, but she does so rarely -- far less often than her counterparts either on Fox or MSNBC. And to compare her in this regard to Ann Coulter is something of a joke in itself. Coulter has no equal as a purveyor of gossip and smear. She's great at it.
But, as in all such shows, some days are slower than others and sometimes there is considerable repetition, and some of the event threads she follows are less interesting than others, at least to me.
She's about the only talking head on either Fox or MSNBC that I feel I can actually LEARN something from -- aside from the bias of the head itself. I'll just mention one example. A few months ago, Maddow took a walk through the neighborhoods of Baghdad with correspondent Richard Engel. She was the audience's proxy, while Engel explained the people and things they were looking at. The sequence was edited, of course, yet I felt I learned more about Iraq's behavior stream in those segments than I had ever known before. Just for instance, not all Moslems give two hoots about observing the rules about fasting on Ramadan. They're like Christians, with their varying degrees of allegiance to their religion.
I won't go on, except to say that among all the clutter and the glitz and the swooping banners and the breaking news and the electronic percussion and the fanfares of both Fox and MSNBC, her show comes as a big relief. I don't need to reach for the aspirin.