This is supposedly a woman of great integrity, according to her fan club. Yet she sat there on Countdown for months agreeing with every utterance that came out of Keith Olbermann's mouth, even during the dark days of his nearly insane rantings about Hillary Clinton, batting her eyes at him (even funnier, she's an out lesbian)flirtatiously. Her reward for playing the role of Keith's Mini-Me (hey, matching haircuts!) is that she gets Dan Abrams bumped off of TV and gets her own show. And then Olbermann has her on his show in order to boast that she owes it all to him. The whole thing was very tacky, and Maddow comes off to me and others I know as a smug know-it-all and a social climber par excellance. I seldom agree with Joe Scarborough, but I have to admit I share his almost visceral disdain for Maddow's very presence. I think the Divine Ms. M will soon find out that carrying a TV show on your own is much harder than running your mouth as a guest.

It can't be much fun for Glen Greenwald to keep trying to remind the world of how skewed the media spectrum (such as it is) has become. Not when these other outlets, with mass audiences and sound-bite techniques, keep telling the public that they are the center of fair and balanced reporting. The skewing goes on and on, and lots of thoughtful people get fed up and wash their hands of the whole thing.

But it's crucial to keep pointing out this reality, if for no other reason than to have it on record somewhere. Thanks to Greenwald for keeping up this fight and continuing to calibrate the rightward bias of the media. Fox News is only one data point.

to get McCain elected. This ex-Republic is fucked, eaten by stupidity, sloth, greed, malice, and corruption.

And the idiots can't get enough brainwashing. Walmart zombie self-haters. Tools. Stockholm syndrome?

It's bad enough that Maddow is a liberal but a gay one at that. It'll be interesting to see if four years from now she'll be hosting one of the presidential debates instead of the same grayheads who are posted to do so now: Shieffer, Brokaw and Lehrer.

See NPR's Michelle Martin's "Debatable Choices" for a comparison. http://www.theroot.com/id/47678

Why can't Sacha Zimmerman just say, "I'm a right-wing Zionist, and I don't agree with Rachel Maddow."

Instead we get histrionic hand-wringing over the state of our public political discourse from a someone who believes himself to be some kind of custodian of journalistic balance. It's so unseemly.

Maddow is seriously overrated

This is supposedly a woman of great integrity, according to her fan club. Yet she sat there on Countdown for months agreeing with every utterance that came out of Keith Olbermann's mouth, even during the dark days of his nearly insane rantings about Hillary Clinton, batting her eyes at him (even funnier, she's an out lesbian)flirtatiously.

Amazing that there are still so many people who see the entire world through -- every last square inch of it -- exclusively through the prism of their specific preference in the Obama v. Hillary wars (Hard-core Obama fanatics now think that Chris Matthews and other Hilary-haters are exemplars of great journalism and hard-core Hillary fanatics think that Fox is Fair and Balanced).

OK - so Rachel Maddow is a seriously overrated, vacant shrew who used feminine wiles to get a show -- all because she didn't support Hillary vociferously enough.

So who are the great people on cable news who are better, who should have their own shows? Lanny Davis and Sean Hannity?

wiki:

Maddow later obtained a degree in public policy from Stanford University in 1994. She then received a Rhodes Scholarship in 1995 and used it to obtain a D.Phil. in political science from Lincoln College, Oxford University.

Which immediately--by itself--puts her in the top 1% of political commentators in terms of background and qualifications.

Zimmerman:

By all means we should have progressive and conservative commentators and analysts, but is there no room for argument between the two?

Apparently so:

"Now she appears on a new roundtable show, “Race for the White House,” hosted by NBC’s David Gregory at 5 p.m. weekdays.

She sits next to Pat Buchanan, the old Nixon hand and Republican presidential candidate who often tacks to the right of the party. Their rapport is not warm, but at least they don’t yell across the room at each other, as Eleanor Clift and Buchanan do every week on “The McLaughlin Group.”

Watching them on MSNBC, I’m reminded how many Buchanans are represented in the chattering class, yet how few Maddows there are, tacking to the Democrats’ left. And if you think the party’s nominee is left-wing, you haven’t heard a progressive pundit lately.

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/columnists/aaron_barnhart/story/661526-p2.html

and finally,

Today MSNBC is No. 3 with a bullet. It’s surging among the 25-to-54-year-olds who have always eluded cable news channels. In this demographic MSNBC is regularly beating CNN in prime time and even starting to challenge Fox News Channel.

For the record, Fox News continues to swamp MSNBC in total audience. But advertisers will pay richly to reach young viewers, even in small batches. So it did not go unnoticed last month when Maddow guest-anchored “Countdown,” and her rating in the age 25-54 “demo” was higher than Bill O’Reilly’s for the same hour on Fox.

I think MSNBC's calculation re: Maddow has nothing to do with "post-partisan", "partisan", "balance", or any other political calculation. They simply see a market and are selling into it. Fine by me--Maddow is clearly better than 99% of what's out there now. All that remains to be seen I suppose is whether she can maintain her independence within MSNBC, or whether she will succomb to that culture.

Why is it if I support someone whom I have watched and listened to extensively, I am part of some fan club. I am a member of the truth squad and evaluate the facts in a statement no matter who makes it. I am still waiting for someone including the Hillary critics to provide some quotes by Maddow and tell us specifically what is wrong with them. Without that, all you are providing is noise and emotions.

And those who have earned their McShameful points, don't bother us any more. You will just be ignored and shown for the fools you are because you have nothing substantive to offer to the discussion.