Rachel Maddow

Rachel Anne Maddow (, ; born April 1, 1973) is an American television news program host and liberal political commentator.

Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a weekly television show on MSNBC, and serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor.

She earned a degree in public policy at Stanford in 1994.

At graduation, she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship.

She was the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford.

She had also been awarded a Marshall Scholarship the same year but turned it down in favor of the Rhodes.

This made her the first openly lesbian winner of the Rhodes Scholarship.

Maddow's first job as a radio host was in 1999 at WRNX (100.9 FM) in Holyoke, Massachusetts, then home to "The Dave in the Morning Show".

She entered and won a contest the station held to find a new second lead for the show's principal host, Dave Brinnel.

In 2001, she earned a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in politics at the University of Oxford.

Her thesis was titled "HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons" and was supervised by Lucia Zedner.

After the WRNX show, she hosted Big Breakfast on WRSI in Northampton, Massachusetts, for two years, leaving in 2004 to join the new Air America radio network.

Her syndicated talk radio program of the same name aired on Air America Radio from 2005 to 2010.

Maddow has received multiple Emmy Awards for her broadcasting work and in 2021 received a Grammy Award for the audiobook version of Blowout (2019).

Maddow holds a bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford University and a doctorate in political science from the University of Oxford and is the first openly lesbian anchor to host a major prime-time news program in the United States.

Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California.

Her father, Robert B. Maddow, is a former United States Air Force captain who resigned his commission the year before her birth and then worked as a lawyer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Her mother, Elaine (née Gosse), was a school program administrator.

She has one older brother, David.

Her paternal grandfather was from a Jewish family (the original family surname being Medvedof), who arrived in the United States from the Russian Empire.

Her paternal grandmother was of Dutch descent.

Maddow's Canadian mother, originally from Newfoundland and Labrador, has English and Irish ancestry.

Maddow has said her family is "very, very Catholic" and she grew up in a community that her mother has described as "very conservative".

Maddow was a competitive athlete and participated in high school volleyball, basketball, and swimming.

Referring to John Hughes films, Maddow has described herself as being "a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl" in high school.

She is a graduate of Castro Valley High School and attended Stanford University.

While a freshman, she was outed as a lesbian by the college newspaper when an interview with her was published before she could tell her parents.

There she hosted Unfiltered along with Chuck D (of the hip hop group Public Enemy) and Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show) until its cancellation in March 2005.

Two weeks after the cancellation of Unfiltered in April 2005, Maddow's weekday two-hour radio program, The Rachel Maddow Show, began airing; in March 2008 it gained a third hour, broadcasting from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with David Bender filling in the third hour for the call-in section, when Maddow was on TV assignment.

In June 2005, Maddow became a regular panelist on the MSNBC show Tucker, hosted by Tucker Carlson.

During and after the November 2006 election, she was a guest on CNN's Paula Zahn Now; she was also a correspondent for The Advocate Newsmagazine, an LGBT-oriented short-form newsmagazine for Logo deriving from news items published by The Advocate.

In 2008, the show's length returned to two hours when Maddow began the nightly MSNBC television program, also called The Rachel Maddow Show.

In January 2008, Maddow became an MSNBC political analyst and was a regular panelist on MSNBC's Race for the White House with David Gregory and MSNBC's election coverage as well as a frequent contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

In 2008, Maddow was the substitute host for Countdown with Keith Olbermann, her first time hosting a program on MSNBC.

Maddow described herself on-air as "nervous".

Keith Olbermann complimented her work, and she was brought back to host Countdown the next month.

Early in 2009, after renewing her contract with Air America, Maddow's radio show was moved to a one-hour timeslot at 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

This iteration of the show began with a short introduction from Maddow followed by a broadcast based on the audio from the previous night's MSNBC broadcast of Maddow's television show.

Little explanation or warning was given for this shift except for Maddow's comments that doing two daily shows was far too taxing.

Maddow's radio show ended on January 21, 2010 when Air America ceased operations.