Rachel Maddow in Rolling Stone

I've been a great critic in the past of the growing irrelevance of Rolling Stone, but in the last few years -- ever since the McCrystal story -- it has been quite relevant. This week RS has a think piece on Rachel Maddow and what she is trying to do as the new face of MSNBC that is quite good:

"Television news, in 2008, is still more or less a jock's medium, and this is the way that jocks bait transfer students, mocking them as clueless hicks. In the final years of the Bush administration, Olbermann has transformed liberal anger into a smirk, a feeling of superiority over the dorks and freaks and clown who run Washington. But what makes Olbermann's introduction of Palin arresting, in retrospect, is not his patronizing tone, but the woman who is waiting to speak, on a splitscreen: Rachel Maddow, a 35-year-old radio host who is about to debut her own show on MSNBC, and who will eventually take over for Olbermann as the face of the network.

"From the start, Maddow's brand is not so much out lesbian or angry liberal, but full-on nerd: the chunky black glasses, the flailing limbs. She doesn't seem to care much about the question that Olbermann has fixed on: So just who is Sarah Palin? 'We don't know very much about Governor Palin,' Maddow says, when Olbermann finally gives her a chance to speak. 'She's basically been a human-interest story in terms of the political press in this country thus far.' Then she moves on to what really interests her: not politics as personality but politics as mechanism, not who is winning power but what is being done with it."

More here.