Air America replacing Marc Maron with Rachel Maddow?

Air America replacing Marc Maron with Rachel Maddow?

by hbyronk
Sun Nov 13, 2005 at 10:47:18 AM PDT
The reason Air America has been playing contract hardball with "Morning Sedition" co-host Marc Maron comes into clearer focus after reading an article in this morning's New York Times. The piece focuses on Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow as the network's breakout stars. Randi gets her due as the second highest-rated host after Al Franken.

Rachel's inclusion is a little harder to understand. The angle of the article is "women on talk radio." Rachel, frankly, has a higher profile for her appearances on "The Situation with Tucker Carlson" than she does for her pre-dawn news show on Air America, a fact acknowleged in the article. But, the following passage indicates that Air America has bigger plans for her:

"Air America has to look beyond Franken and Garofalo," Mr. Harrison said, "and Rachel and Randi are turning out to be quite good, and quite successful for them."

The network is expected to announce imminently a move by Ms. Maddow into a more prominent morning drive-time role.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/13/124718/18

They Look Nothing Like Rush Limbaugh

By SUSAN BRENNA
Published: November 13, 2005
RACHEL MADDOW is the sunny, 32-year-old early bird of liberal talk radio, who spices her pre-dawn newscast on the Air America network with news of the weird. "I have to tell you about this story, or it will possess me for the rest of my natural-born life," Ms. Maddow mentioned one very early morning last month.


Randi Rhodes, above, and Rachel Maddow bring different styles to a talk-radio scene dominated by male voices. They are, said Danny Goldberg, Air America's chief executive, "the two people who have emerged in dramatic fashion."

A Chinese man had been harvesting bile for medicine from the gall bladders of live bears until the day before, when his bears ate him. "You keep six bears and poke them with a sharp stick through their abdomen every day for their bile," Ms. Maddow said in a buoyant rapid fire, "eventually they're going to make their own decision, don't you think?"

Ms. Maddow's Air America colleague, Randi Rhodes, is a more political, more acidly caustic voice who calls the Bush administration "the dark side." On Ms. Rhodes's four-hour afternoon show, she's the middle-aged woman (she's 46) who doesn't have the time or patience to be nice. "You're a pig!" she cries at whatever male conservative broadcaster has angered her that day.


Rachel Maddow, 32, hosts a pre-dawn radio newscast on Air America.

They are two sides of the liberal talk-radio coin. In their own small way, over at the far end of the AM dial where Air America is broadcast in most of its 72 cities, Ms. Maddow and Ms. Rhodes are changing the world of talk radio. Michael Harrison, editor of the trade magazine Talkers, said that, "For the most part, political talk radio is male," dominated by conservative broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. "But in the next 5 to 10 years we're going to see an invasion of talk radio by women of all political and subject stripes."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/arts/13bren.html