Rachel Maddow Profile

The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove profiles Rachel Maddow…

For a cable news host intent on luring eyeballs to her prime-time show, Rachel Maddow aspires to an impossibly high standard. Her contrarian production values—athwart competing outlets dominated by ranting heads, cheeseball populism, and celebrity bathos—are civility and good taste.

Until Monday night, when she could no longer resist the barbarian hordes, she’d banned the so-called Ground Zero Mosque Controversy from her 9 p.m. program, notwithstanding that it has been Topic A for the past couple of weeks in nearly every other day part of her second-place network, MSNBC.

“I’d rather not cover it,” she tells me, never mind that President Obama has entered the fray. “It’s just one of those fake, non-controversial things that has been ginned up into a controversy for a political purpose. Participating in the discussion of this, as a political matter, is playing right into the hands of the people who ginned this up.” (By “the people who ginned this up,” she means Fox News and its allies—about which more in a moment.) “Adding to the volume—in both senses of the word—of the coverage, um, grosses me out a little bit,” she says.