Rachel Maddow

Maddow took a doctorate in politics at Oxford as the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes scholarship, wrote her thesis on HIV in prisons, and came to broadcasting through a local morning show she won in an open audition. Her cable programme has run since 2008 in a format that is mostly a long explanatory monologue, which nobody else has managed to sustain. Blowout is about the oil and gas industry, Prequel about American fascist organising in the nineteen forties, and Bag Man reconstructs the corruption case that removed Spiro Agnew. She works from documents and footnotes them, which is unusual for the format.