Was her neck always that thick? Delicate it ain’t. It’s the neck of a fullback.
Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that. But I tune in for the first ten minutes for that steel trap. After that her selfsatisfaction wit now deucedly clever she is starts reaching Jimmy Fallon territory.
Broadcast media will only rot your mind. Don’t watch any TV personalities. They only sell you to advertisers.
could be -
I do think her explanations are excellent but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen her. this is a good reminder to look her up on youtube. 
I always watch Rachel with a DVR. That way I can pick up the info the first time, skip over the repetition. I agree she is good at connecting together bits of news that I would have missed connecting, but when there isn’t big news the hyping of small bits drives me nuts.
Looking at number of viewers is a tricky business. Maddow’s current viewership is about 2.5 million, which means that many, many more people do not watch her show than watch her show. She’s currently a couple ticks behind Laura Ingraham’s show. I’m going to guess that you’re not a big fan of Ingraham’s :). Would you argue that Ingraham’s viewership numbers make it incumbent on those who don’t watch her show to find out what makes her so very popular among other people?
My wife watches a lot of MSNBC. Maddow and Chris Matthews are my least favorite of the hosts. The OP is exactly right about the annoyingly and unnecessarily repetitive repetition–the OP’s second paragraph is right on–and while I wouldn’t necessarily call it condescension, Maddow definitely gives off a rather smug vibe of “I’m smarter than everybody.” Chris Hayes, Katy Tur, and several of the other MSNBC hosts are able to explain the same kinds of things in a way that is neither so repetitive nor so smug, and they do it much more effectively.
Maddow’s not terrible, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t get the hype.
I love her style.
Yes, the repetition can be annoying to those of us who are ‘fast thinkers’; who are up-to-date on the issues and connect the dots easily. But not all of of us are like that and I appreciate her clarity. There really isn’t another newscaster who can walk you through a story point by point the way she does. The cases she builds are as clear as they can ever be made to be.
I also appreciate that when she introduces someone who has written a book or a news article, she gives an overview and then checks with the author to see that her presentation of their view is an accurate one. I rarely ever see anyone else do this.
I just spent the holiday with some “New World Order/Conspiracy Theory” relatives. If course they don’t like or trust Maddow, nor do they watch her or listen to her, but the differences between the way she thinks and presents and they way they do is why I think Maddow takes such great pains to be very, very clear in her presentations. Why these folks will believe some random guy with a YouTube video (“Research!”) over Maddow I just cannot nor ever will understand.
Also, she’s such a prude! LOL!
She is all clickbait and no news.
She staked her whole journalistic reputation upon the Mueller hearings, and lost. That was her entire show. Any talent as an investigative reporter is now laughable.
It’s true. It’s funny to watch her get all flustered over bad language in transcripts and so on. 
yes, and she is excellent at interviewing them.
My point was that, if it’s in online video, you can just skip the repetition and jump straight to the point, and then stop once you know the point.
I do this all the time with some more clickbaity videos where the title asks a question I’d love to know the anser to. I skip until I learn the answer, then I stop.
That’s all I’m suggesting. I did that with Maddow a few times back when I was still watching.
If I just want a summary of an important news item, I can usually find it at Reuters, SDMB, or Aljazeera. (Unfortunately, Google, Bing, and Yahoo News Homepages all tend to be too frustrating these days :mad: )
But more than just getting the brief gist of a story … I like Rachel’s commentary! I just want her to stop repeating every single sentence five times.
ETA: While idly Googling a few weeks ago, I saw that Rachel’s salary is $7 million. I was slightly disappointed: I liked to imagine her as a fellow peasant, making just $2 million or so. 
If you’re devoting 100% of your attention to TRMS, you’re doing it wrong.
Watch the opening segment. 1st commercial, go make a cocktail. Come back* and sip that cocktail for 2nd segment. Maybe open up a browser tab to check a story mentioned, or weed out some emails from the Inbox, while the rest of the class gets walked through why what we’ve just learned means what it means. Skim the AP or Reuters headlines. And so on.
*Bring pie.
Not everyone watched on Wednesday. And that’s how news works.
I slavishly follow the Hong Kong news in the Times. Every single article has the same few paragraphs on the background of the crisis cut and pasted from the article the day before and the day before and the day before that.
I love her, but she is still on the air to sell soap, and if blowing every story that day into the crisis of the century, blame commercial TV, not her. Ditto for cliffhangers before commercials.
She is on at the same time as Hannity you know. Just think about that. Maddow and Hannity in the same field doing their thing. Now who has a problem?
I am generally appreciative of the long wind-ups she gives but, yeah, sometimes I have to skip ahead a bit. I do think it’s helpful to the people who don’t tune in every night, or follow particular stories super-closely.
I learned two things about Maddow recently; one that was just mildly amusing and one that increased my (already high) esteem for her. First, she dropped more f-bombs in her recent book (“Blowout”) than I would have expected given her on-air prudishness.
As to the second, I recently finished Ronan Farrow’s book, “Catch and Kill,” about Harvey Weinstein, Black Cube, and NBC’s failures in covering and sending out the story. Farrow talks about how, after his story was published by The New Yorker, he began to get suddenly uninvited as a guest from NBC-produced shows. He reached out to some people at NBC that he knew, and found out that edicts were coming down from on high that he was not to be interviewed. Quoting from the book:
I admire that kind of backbone.
I can’t stand watching or listening to Ms. Maddow. She’s awful. Nearly content-free IME, but she does repeat herself endlessly; I agree with that. I’ve tried watching her many times and have no idea why people enjoy listening to her or watching her or relying on her for information.
A lot of it has to do with face expressions. She has this constant ever-present smirk and sneer.
Yeah, she put a tarantula in Mr. Rogers’ sweater once.
And the tarantula became Mr. Roger’s friend; whereas Rachel didn’t because she took too long and was too repetitive in explaining to Fred (I like that name) why she should be his friend.