Per Nielsen, the network averaged 483,096 African-American viewers across its weekday prime time programming of All In With Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show and The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell. 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.In 2017, MSNBC was the most-watched cable network among African-Americans in weekday prime time.
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. She entered and won a contest the station held to find a new second lead for the show's principal host, Dave Brinnel. 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". Her thesis is titled HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons her supervisor was Lucia Zedner. In 2001, she earned a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in politics at the University of Oxford. This made her the first openly lesbian winner of the Rhodes Scholarship. She had also been awarded a Marshall Scholarship the same year but turned it down in favour of the Rhodes. She was the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford. At graduation, she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship. She earned a degree in public policy at Stanford in 1994. 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. She is a graduate of Castro Valley High School and attended Stanford University. Referring to John Hughes films, Maddow has described herself as being "a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl" in high school. Maddow was a competitive athlete and participated in high school volleyball, basketball, and swimming. 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's Canadian mother, originally from Newfoundland and Labrador, has English and Irish ancestry. Her paternal grandmother was of Dutch descent. Her paternal grandfather was from a family of Jews (the original family surname being "Medvedof"), who arrived in the United States from the Russian Empire. Her mother, Elaine (née Gosse), was a school program administrator. 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. Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California. Asked about her political views by the Valley Advocate, Maddow replied, "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform." Maddow holds a bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford University and a doctorate in political science from Oxford University and is the first openly lesbian anchor to host a major prime-time news program in the United States. Maddow has received multiple Emmy Awards for her broadcasting work and in 2021 received a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her book Blowout (2019).
Her syndicated talk radio program of the same name aired on Air America Radio from 2005 to 2010. Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a nightly television show on MSNBC, and serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor alongside Brian Williams.
Rachel Anne Maddow ( / ˈ m æ d oʊ/ ( listen), MAD-oh born April 1, 1973) is an American television news program host and liberal political commentator.