Maddow about the girl

Rachel Maddow is almost becoming as much the face of change in America as Barack Obama himself. Just as a new generation of Americans sees Obama and thinks 'So what if he is black?',  it watches Maddow's TV news show and thinks 'So what if she is liberal and lesbian?'

Maddow, 35, has become an overnight phenomenon on US TV, an unanticipated by-product of the marathon presidential election. It is not just that she is an unabashed lesbian with the preppy good looks of an Harvard undergraduate; she is as smart as a whip, unashamedly international, and drips with arched-eyebrow irony as she leads viewers through the latest details of economic collapse or foreign policy debacle.

All of the above could have got a girl stomped to dust in the heyday of Dubya Bush's America: just ask the Dixie Chicks, the country and western band vilified for opposing the invasion of Iraq. But Maddow is enjoying a media 'break-out' of unrivalled proportions.

Last week, MSNBC, the cable news channel competing with Fox and CNN, published the ratings for The Rachel Maddow Show, launched in the 9pm prime-time slot just four weeks earlier. Maddow had doubled their audience, from around 800,000 to a steady 1.7m. "I'm pinching myself," says Phil Griffin, MSNBC president, saying that he expects a new show to take two or three years to do this.

What makes Maddow's rise so telling is that she is the face of a trend, rather than a novelty. The Big Three 'network' news shows that once dominated the national media are dying, their ratings in the basement.

They met their Waterloo in the last election cycle when it became clear that a whole new generation no longer believed a word they said: their patriotic charade over Iraq and the War on Terror had seen to that. Instead, the young had turned to Jon Stewart's satirical The Daily Show on the Comedy Channel for their 'news'.

MSNBC was the first to poach the format for 'real' news, letting Keith Olbermann (left) adopt an openly dissenting left-of-centre, anti-Bush stance for his 8pm Countdown news show. That show, which also features Maddow, now beats CNN every night in the crucial 25 to 54-year-old demographic, the Holy Grail of the media business.

The Fox News Channel still boasts the highest rated hour of any cable news with its playing-to-the-mob O'Reilly Factor, scoring 4m viewers. But for Maddow, drawing the 25-to-54 demographic, to beat tired old Larry King on CNN and attract even half as many viewers as Bill O'Reilly amounts to a pop-culture revolution.

Maddow is the opposite of the O'Reilly American in every way. Jewish and unashamedly intellectual, she grew up in northern California, went to Stanford University, seed-bed of the Silicon Valley revolution, and from there to Oxford on a Rhodes Scolarship for a doctorate in political science.

She began life as an Aids campaigner, and got her start in broadcasting with a job on Air America Radio, the station which Al Gore helped start as a counter to the domination  of 'talk radio' by loud-mouthed conservatives. She still broadcasts an afternoon show for Air America Radio.

Maddow met Susan Mikula (left), an artist, in 1999 when she was working on her thesis and, in need of cash, applied for a job as Mikula's gardener. They have been partners ever since, living in Manhattan and the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. Amazingly, Maddow has only just bought her first TV set, a gesture of defiance to the dumbing-down of culture if ever there was one.

Maddow's rise to cult status as Obama leads the race to the White House is as sure a sign as any that America is about to experience its own Tony Blair/New Labour moment. What it makes of it, of course, is anybody's guess. ·