IF YOU’VE EVER seen any snippets of Rachel as she prepared for her show to go live, most often the last two minutes before airtime involve a camera capturing her from behind as she mad-dashes down the hall, pulling on one of her numerous dark-hued jackets, occasionally struggling with a sleeve, followed by an all-out sprint to the set, where she leaps into the anchor chair with maybe a second to spare before the “ON AIR” light comes on, the opening graphics dance across the screen, and she says, “Good evening,” a hint of breathlessness evident in her first words. The show is a runaway train and Rachel is the superhuman engineer veering and gaining speed throughout the day, trying to keep the wheels on the rails.
“Every day, it’s a shock [when nine o’clock arrives] and the show’s only ninety percent done,” she said.
“Doing the show is like jumping out of an airplane. Here it comes, it’s nine o’clock. This is going to happen no matter what I do.”
An hour later, she signs off and after a post-show scrimmage with her core staff, she heads out of the studio to grab a late-night bite and cocktail at Daddy-O, a nearby bistro that serves food until four o’clock in the morning.
Everything that must occur in order to get that “ninety percent done” fifty-three-minute-long show on the air and Rachel flying into her anchor chair five nights a week is an exquisite and painstaking—and painful—superhuman rush of consuming the day’s news, stirring it up, and then serving it up so that it’s palatable on the other end, assisted by staffers who do everything from clearing permissions for old news clips and pre-interviewing potential guests to blocking out the camera angles over the course of the show.
“Rachel works incredibly hard, but it takes a village every night to get it on the air,” said executive producer Cory Gnazzo.
“Rachel is a one-woman data-mining operation,” said Kent Jones, who worked with Rachel on her radio show and continued on to the TV show.
The entire process is in service to Rachel’s number one thesis of the show, the concept that every story idea must go through before making it onto the air: To introduce viewers to a story that hasn’t been overplayed in the rest of the mainstream media while also not getting too cerebral—or negative.
At times, it is a precarious balancing act. “First, we need to be able to synthesize a lot of information, and then exclude from our field of consideration the stuff that isn’t important so we can find the salient, new thing,” said Rachel. “And that is very rarely something overt.”
Before she heads out to the studio, she starts her day in quiet, waking up around eight o’clock. “I’m not a morning person,” she admitted. “Before noon, all I’m capable of is marmalade and mumbling.”
And she tries to avoid the media as much as possible; after all, she’ll get plenty of it in just a few short hours. “I usually don’t spend too much time looking at the news before I come into the office because I try to compartmentalize my life a little bit, so I have a little bit of sanity, a little bit of usable brain by the time I get to work,” she said.
Sometimes she goes for a run, a sport that she picked up only when she was thirty-eight, despite the fact that she was an avid competitive athlete all throughout high school. However, her favorite sport has always been fishing. She finds it relaxing, allowing her mind to wander before heading uptown to the studio. Sometimes she even drops a line in the nearby Hudson River in the wee hours of the morning to de-stress after the show wraps.
Before she arrives at the office around noon, Rachel gears up for the day by reading a lengthy note prepared by a senior producer that spells out what she and other top staffers anticipate the biggest stories of the day will be and why they think they should make it onto the show a painfully short nine hours later. Rachel also scrolls through her own news sources, marks up the likely candidates, and then climbs into a car that will ferry her a couple of miles away to midtown and the MSNBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Before she opens the door, Rachel takes a few deep breaths in the car. They’re the last few normal, unhurried breaths she’ll have for the next ten hours.
Her first task of the day is to hole up in her office for the next two hours to comb through her list of story ideas along with the morning note from the producer. Then she prints out all of the competing story ideas from a variety of websites and spreads them out all over her office. “I get down on the floor with all my paper, and I make this big grid which is very embarrassing,” she said.
She admits that her process is neither efficient nor green. “I am a paper monster,” she said, going through about five hundred sheets of paper to print out newspaper stories, journal articles, and copy pages from books so she can scrawl all over them and arrange them in some semblance of order.
What does she consume? Basically a little bit of everything.
“I have my must-reads: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Review, though we try to geographically change up the sources of information, so I also try to read the St. Louis Dispatch, the Texas Tribune, and the Portland Press Herald on a rotating basis, particularly if I know something interesting is happening in that state,” she said. “That’s also fun, because that’s where you get the little giblets of stuff that people don’t necessarily know about … and we can introduce [it].”
From there she gets a little wonky. “Government Executive has some stuff in it that will lead down some interesting paths, and there are some bloggers that I love on water policy and people I trust who blog on voting rights.”
She also relies on several staffers who have wonky specialties of their own. “I’ve got one guy on my staff who’s really good on energy issues, another who’s good on the Middle East, and somebody else who is a little OCD about states you’ve never heard of, like [the fact that] Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.”
But no matter what she reads, she tries to avoid reading the opinion pages of any publication, focusing only on originally reported stories and editorial content. “I don’t want to absorb other people’s opinions and I don’t want to become part of a tide of common wisdom on something, I’d rather be my own thing,” she said.
“Much more than I wish was true, I tend to at least subconsciously agree with the last thing I heard that made sense, and so I try to consume as much fact and reporting as I can and as little of other people’s analysis as I can.”
During this phase, she has to shut the world out because she’s afraid she might miss one little nugget that would make the story absolutely shine. “The best part of the story might be a very small detail,” she said.
“You follow the storytelling. If you can do good work or you can add something that is truly not known, people might watch it, even if it’s on something very obscure. And the more obscure the topic, the better the storytelling has to be.”
She adds that unlike other hosts, she never underestimates the intelligence of her audience, and she tries to talk to her viewers the same way she would if she were leading a seminar in graduate school. “I do think if you are good enough at expository writing and the use of visual elements, you can get to an incredibly intense level of detail, and have people really get it,” she said. “But you have to be good at it.”
Through the years, some of her staffers have told her to ease up, that she doesn’t have to spend every afternoon as though she’s cramming for the hardest finals in the world. But she ignores them, because she is motivated by just one thing: fear of failure.
“It’s not that I believe a segment will be better because I read those extra twenty pages, it’s because I’m worried that if I don’t, I’ll say something wrong,” she admitted. “It’s negative motivation, which makes for a high-stress atmosphere.”
Two hours later, she knows that she’s barely scratched the surface, but with airtime a mere seven hours away, the next phase of the schedule kicks in: Twenty senior producers and staffers gather with Rachel in a cramped office, where they duke it out on a big whiteboard over the stories and guests that will make it onto the air that evening. Rachel writes down a working headline for each story she’d like to do, based on a combination of the morning news notes and news she’s already reviewed, while staffers call out their own ideas of what should be covered that night.
Sometimes their ideas will be miles apart, and the tension in the room will grow thick, but over the course of the next hour, a list of roughly fifty different story ideas will somehow be whittled down to just six.
“I ask questions, cross some things out, and add my own stuff,” said Rachel. “I usually add as much as [my staff], then we hash it out in terms of what seem like the most important stories of the day. It’s a very hard discussion, and we try to go fast, because time is of the essence at that point, but we work it out.”
They put the most likely ideas under a microscope, analyzing the angles and arc for each story, considering a list of possible guests who could come on the show on very short notice, hypothesizing how the competition may be covering the same topic that night, and pondering how the story will evolve in the hours before airtime. It’s a lot to digest.
As she scrawls ideas and rationalizations onto the board, often ferociously underlining them to drive home her point, Rachel might be mistaken for a college professor defending her ideas and arguments for the topics she believes deserve coverage that night, albeit one dressed in a brown hoodie, jeans, and a Boston Celtics T-shirt.
Frequently, she becomes so passionate about making her argument on the whiteboard that staff members have to ask her to decipher her handwriting. “There’s usually a direct relationship between the legibility of my penmanship and my level of confidence in the segments,” she admitted.
“By the end of the meeting, I’ve usually changed my mind,” she said. “It’s a grumpy meeting. A little testy.”
And she occasionally second-guesses the choices. “Every time you cover one thing it means you can’t spend that time covering something else,” she said.
But despite the fact that staffers—and Rachel—often leave the meeting feeling as if they’ve just participated in a cage fight, everyone involved maintains that the scrum and emotions running high are worth it. “It’s the best part of the day, the most intellectually satisfying part of the day,” said Rachel. “If I ever had to give up this job, that’s the thing that I know I would miss.”
Her preference is unusual in the business; on other shows, staffers will decide on the stories for the day as well as their formats—straight news story, “A-block,” or guest interview?—before meeting with the producers, a small group who will then meet with the host to finalize the show. “I am the final arbiter of what goes on my show, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t take advice,” she said. “I need advice all the time, and that’s why we meet as a group, that’s part of the reason why I do my news meeting every day. I like to meet with everybody because I want to get lots of people’s input. I also sometimes go randomly to staffers and ask, ‘Between these two stories, what do you like?’”
After the meeting adjourns at three o’clock, they all head off to their own turf to write, research, edit, and gather materials for the six segments they finally agreed upon. “I close the door and turn off the lights and turn into sort of a cave-dwelling beast for as long as I can and just read and read and read and read and read while the producers are reading and collecting evidence and calling people and reporting and doing what needs to be done.”
Her office is a testament to the chaotic pig-through-a-python superhuman process of putting together an hour-long show from scratch five nights a week. Stacks of paper cover desk and floor, crammed manila folders in stacks threaten to keel over, water bottles are strewn here and there, and stray Diet Dr Pepper cans perched on bookshelves share space with books such as Debunking 9/11 Myths and The One Percent Doctrine. Phil Griffin might have been overly diplomatic in describing her office as something akin to a library, while Rachel takes a more pragmatic view: “This is how I’m going to die one day, crushed under a pile of paper,” she said.
She starts by outlining and jotting down notes for “A-block,” her monologue that opens the show, for which she does most of the writing, sometimes with a boost from Laura Conaway or another staffer. “A lot with that opening essay is me working it out with the producer, us agreeing on the universe of facts and evidence that we’re going to use and then talking through it while a producer records what I say, and then he or she types it up, and then we work out an edit together based on what I said.”
Other staff members work on developing the visual graphics and illustrations to accompany the stories, including maps, which Rachel detests. “Maps are the bane of my existence, because it’s impossible to do mapping on television for some reason,” she said. “Everything always looks like it was made with a freaking Etch A Sketch, it’s a 1970s Atari pixelated nightmare, I hate it, so we start working on maps early.”
Depending on how much time is left until airtime, Rachel tries to meet with each of the producers in charge of the other segments for that night’s show. “It’s a combination of us writing together, [a producer] writing something and bringing it to me, me writing either just directly into the script software that we’ve got, or sometimes me dictating,” she said.
But no matter what stories are scheduled for that night, or how many producers are on deck, Rachel admits that her propensity toward putting off the writing—whether for “A-block” or a later segment—is “a broken process. I should start writing at four thirty, but sometimes I don’t start writing until six thirty.”
She admits that it not only turns her into a ball of stress, but that it negatively affects the people who work with her. “It’s reckless. It kills my poor staff. They’re so supportive and constructive. But it’s too much to ask. [The show] requires everybody to do everything fast, and if I could just get it done an hour earlier, I think I would put ten years back in the lives of all the people who work with me.”
The last stretch is indeed harrowing, with staffers alternating between frantically running around trying to get everything done and sitting eerily quiet, focused intently on putting the final pieces of the puzzle together as the minutes tick by until 8:46 P.M., which is the absolute witching hour when Rachel runs to the makeup room. “I give them eight minutes to make me up,” she said.
She then runs from the makeup room to her rack of similarly hued jackets, grabs one seemingly at random, then sprints to the set and jumps into the anchor chair. “I arrive like fifteen seconds before the show starts,” she said. “It’s an incredibly, incredibly stupid system. Nobody else’s is that disorganized. But it works.”
Even after the show goes live, Rachel and her staff are still alert to new developments and breaking stories that could throw the carefully planned show schedule into disarray and require her to basically improvise on camera as a new story develops.
For example, just thirty minutes into the April 25, 2018, show, Rachel announced that they had received word of breaking news from Reuters about Ronny Jackson, President Donald Trump’s controversial nomination as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and staff scrambled to get Leo Shane, the deputy editor from Military Times, to appear on the show on very short notice to comment.
On the other side of the coin, guest bookings are a frequent casualty due to a news cycle that could change on a dime. “[Booking guests] never works out because I always change my mind at four in the afternoon,” she admitted. “I send people a lot of bottles of wine and apologies for unbooking them.”
On the other hand, there are many people who don’t even pick up the phone when they see who’s on the other end. “I don’t think you go on The Rachel Maddow Show without doing a lot of preparation,” said Phil Griffin. “You cannot wing it. She’s going to be smart, and she’s going to ask hard questions.”
After years of working by herself—on her academic coursework, thesis, and radio show—Rachel found it difficult to adjust to the team-mentality attitude that putting a live hour-long show on the air requires.
“Occasionally, I will just throw the segment producer’s work out and write the whole thing myself,” she admitted, causing great dismay to those who have put their all into crafting a segment. “It’s unfortunate, but it happens.”
At the same time, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be where she is today without them. “I have to rely on other people to help me tell the story that I’m telling, so I need to be able to count on not only the people who provide me with the facts that go with the charts that I’m putting on the air, but also the people who are running the videotape and putting up the captions and labeling the people,” she said. “I’m completely mystified by [it].”
Once the “ON AIR” light goes on, an eerie peace settles over the studio, and it’s by Rachel’s design: She doesn’t want to think about the fact that almost two million people are focused on her every word, along with countless others who will catch snippets of the show on social media.
She also doesn’t want to be distracted by any superfluous motion or talk in the studio that could distract her from the task at hand, so she limits staffers to just two: her floor director and the guy who operates the jib camera, which resembles a seesaw, with a camera on one end and the controls on the other. Sometimes Susan will stop by, but that’s it. “I pretend no one can see me when I do the show,” she said.
“I need to trick myself into thinking that I don’t have an audience, because I need to be focused on the stories that I’m telling,” she said. “If the camera is turned on you, you [start to] think of yourself as an influential person, and that can build up an evil ego and also mean that you are not thinking all that clearly about your subject matter because you’re so focused on yourself and the world.
“And if you start thinking about what effect you’re gonna have on the world, I think it makes you pull your punches. Or it makes you slant things in a way where you’re trying to move the world in a specific way.”
Sometimes she thinks of her mom during the broadcast, especially when she feels herself getting worked up during a particular segment. “Every once in a while, I can’t stop myself and I get a little all caps, and the person who reins me in on that is my mom,” she said. “She’s violently attuned to loud, so I get a nice little note from my mom—‘You’re raising your voice’—and she calls me afterward so I can hear in her voice how serious it is.”
The chaos is restricted to the control room in 2K, located one floor directly beneath where Rachel perches at her desk, and it’s in that control room where techs and producers are entrusted with making sure the right visuals appear on screen to accompany Rachel’s words at the precise time—so that the wrong button doesn’t get pushed and the “Cocktail Moment” graphic shows up instead of “You Know More Now.”
Or worse. On October 18, 2013, instead of “Cocktail Moment: HEIST EDITION!” part of the graphic was cut off the screen and viewers saw “Cock Mom HEIST!” over Rachel’s shoulder as she smiled and raised her glass in a toast, unaware of the screwup.
Bianca Shea got a firsthand look at that on-air chaos when she interned at the show in the summer of 2016. She often had to conduct detailed fact-checking or search online for relevant videos or graphics whenever breaking news hit while the show was live. “One night, I was in the control room when they needed something pulled off the internet for a tape producer so it could go on the show in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I ran across the building and up a flight of stairs, downloaded it, and emailed the producer the video code.” The video made it onto the show with just seconds to spare, which tends to be the modus operandi at the show.
When the show breaks for a commercial, instead of taking advantage of the respite to kick back for a couple of minutes or make small talk with others, Rachel turns to her computer, typing notes to herself for one of the upcoming segments or perhaps for the following day’s show.
Or maybe she thought of a more nuanced way to convey a bit of information for an upcoming story. After all, she does consider herself to be first and foremost a storyteller. So in addition to providing her audience with the facts necessary to round out their understanding of a story, she has to be concerned with exactly how she tells that story, the degree of emotion, empathy, and humor.
And to Rachel, there will never be enough time for that. “I think an overt part of storytelling [is] to think about the emotional content of what you’re doing, and that has two parts,” she said. “One is your tone of voice, how much emotion you show and whether or not you are upset about something, [because] if you are raising your voice, people will hear less of what you are saying. [Instead], be persuasive, be authoritative, and have a voice that people can listen to.
“I am as rage filled as the next guy,” she admitted, though she rarely allows it to flash on camera. The same can’t be said when she is covering a story of a prominent politician’s downfall brought on by his or her own incompetence, greed, or stupidity; in those cases, it’s almost impossible for her to hide her joy. “I defy anybody to have shown more glee or spent more minutes of airtime enjoying the spectacularly corrupt and profane downfall of Rod Blagojevich in Illinois,” she said. “That stuff is gold.”
In fact, just as there’s never enough time during the day to produce the perfect show that night, there’s also no time during the show to cut loose, it’s so highly scripted. Kent Jones, for one, would love to improvise a bit on air, even make Rachel laugh at something unexpected. But he admits that Rachel’s penchant for writing out every word she utters on the air, plus the fact that they are never able to squeeze in everything they would like to, means that Rachel dropping the mask for even a few seconds is a rare occurrence. “We don’t have enough time,” said Jones. “We were on the radio together for years, and you can stretch out a little bit on the radio, let a moment happen, but [on TV] we don’t have time to let go, as much fun as it would be to do.”
One of Rachel’s pet peeves, on and off the air, is when someone ends a sentence with an inflection that makes them sound as though they’re asking a question; she thinks they “don’t sound authoritative.”
In fact, she hates it so much that she forbids her staff from putting a question mark in anything they write for her, even when a segment requires Rachel to ask a question of a guest. “There will never be a question mark used as punctuation in any script ever given to me,” she said, admitting that she’s struggled with this very issue. “But it’s a worse problem [for millennials]. You have to cut that shit out. Really. It’s very serious. I have not hired people who talk that way, because I know that I can never, ever use them on camera.”
She also tries to keep the emotion out of her voice whenever she’s on the air because she doesn’t want viewers to think she’s trying to manipulate them, though she admits that this is sometimes difficult to achieve. “We [often] cover things that are outrageous that get [viewers] worked up, but I should not be outraged when telling the story,” she said. “Instead, I should be focused on creating that feeling in the people who are watching, don’t tell people I’m upset or angry, make them upset or angry. I have to block myself off from the audience in a way so that I’m doing a good job but I don’t tell people how I feel.”
She also tries to hold a little bit of her personality back, so as not to reveal everything, and keep a little bit of the real Rachel in reserve. “When something moves me, I pay attention to my own feelings, stick a pin in that, and then try to make sure that gets into our broadcast about the show. So, it’s very personal, but it does mean I have to kind of show myself a little bit.”
Once the show wraps, she heads back to the makeup chair to scrub off the foundation and mascara, meets with a few staffers to assess the show, then heads out sometime between ten thirty and twelve thirty to a neighborhood bistro to grab dinner and drinks, sometimes with a producer or two in tow to discuss future shows. But one topic of conversation that is rarely broached at these post-work gatherings is how the most recent show went, because they already know how Rachel feels about it: The vast majority of the time, she’s unhappy with how it unfolded. “I see my job as making a TV show, and I fail at it constantly,” she said, admitting that on most shows she gives herself a C grade or less, due to technical challenges, less-than-scintillating guests, as well as her own skills as an interviewer, which she pegs as subpar.
In fact, she has occasionally tortured herself after what she perceives to be a particularly wretched show by telling herself that she just did such a lousy job that she’s convinced she’s going to be fired the next day. And if the show ever went off the air, what would be her greatest loss? “My freedom,” she said.
She’s not hard on herself all the time, of course; whenever she thinks the show went well, undoubtedly it’s because she feels she’s been able to deepen people’s understanding of a particular story and make them see it in a new light.
But for the most part, she also tries to ignore feedback on how a particular show or segment or the program overall affects her standing and fame in the world. “I don’t know very much about how I am received in the world in the sense that I don’t know how people see me or use what I do because I purposely isolate myself from it,” she admitted. “I don’t feel like that would help me be better at it, and I feel like it might weird me out.”
But she relished whenever public figures attempted to further their profile by poking fun at her. “Wow, [former United States senator] David Vitter thinks that he’s going to get somewhere that he isn’t already by talking about the fact that he thinks I’m too masculine? It’s a great compliment.”
Even though Rachel considers herself to be a lone wolf when it comes to the bulk of the work she does on her show, she worries about the effect that the relentless pace of cranking out her show has on her staff. “I think about all of these brilliant young producers who work on my show, and essentially working on my show is the process of grinding your bones to dust each day, an inch at a time,” she said.
“Six segments, new content, new angle, something fresh, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. And keeping the energy level and staying focused even when you’re not moved by anything going on in the news is hard. You need a facile enough brain to have that many interesting things to say about that many different subjects that many times a week, week after week after week,” she admitted.
“It’s hard to keep people for the long haul.”
Admittedly, not everyone is cut out for the brutal pace. By the same token, not everyone is able to deal with Rachel as boss, calling all of the shots. She confided that whenever a newly hired producer believed that she would be able to steer the course not only of an individual show or segment—instead of Rachel—that the staffer’s tenure would not last long.
The fact that Rachel was not particularly fast at any aspect of her work—except when it came to talking—only added to her workload and pressure. “I’m a very slow worker, it takes me a really long time to do anything. I’m like a little sloth, the way I get through stuff, and so I work very long, plodding days,” she said.
“It takes me a good solid ten hours to prep an hour of TV, and that’s with not taking a lunch break and not making any phone calls and not talking to anybody about anything other than the show that day, and not reading my emails.”
Despite her track record, she does hold out hope that someday it will get easier. “I assume that I will get better at this and not take so long to get everything done, in which case I’ll have some more time [to do other things].”