Rachel's Gift

We're into week 2 of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and the ratings are strong. She continues to beat Larry King, both in the demo and overall; she's already getting three times the viewers of Glenn Beck; and she actually beat her lead-in Keith Olbermann on Tuesday night. Rachel is nowhere near Hannity & Colmes yet, but the show is only two weeks old.

I've been TiVo'ing it and watching, and I have to say that it's unlike anything else on cable news. Olbermann comes out of the cable tradition, and his internal rivalries with the likes of O'Reilly and Limbaugh set it in a certain shoutfest space (even though he never has on anybody who disagrees with him, which I think is actually a mistake). Maddow's show is completely different. It's relentlessly factual, engaging and while it has a point of view, it uses argument over bluster to make it. It's quite extraordinary, not only because she manages to expose someone like Tom Frank to the cable-watching world, but because it's a show that uses complete sentences and actually foregrounds facts. Not to mention that it shares Maddow's taste for the absurd, like the story yesterday about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars being rolled back to $100, for example.

It's a really impressive achievement so far.