Rachel Maddow Is Learning to Accept MSNBC’s Rebrand to “MS NOW”

Rachel Maddow knows a thing or two about “how you can tell when the government’s going real bad.” Since negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal to host her MSNBC news show only one night a week, she’s explored authoritarianism in her podcast Ultra and zeroed in on the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory via the film From Russia With Lev. Her most recent project: the 90-minute documentary Andrew Young: The Dirty Work, which examines the life of now 93-year-old Andrew Jackson Young Jr.’s trajectory from pastor to Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man to serving as the first Black congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction, as well as mayor of Atlanta.

Dirty Work is a portrait of ambition and strategy that lingers less on moments of glory than it does on quandaries and trade-offs. Young describes the “Uncle Tom” role he played in the Civil Rights movement and the scandal that erupted after he had an unauthorized meeting with an official from the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1979. Even though then president Jimmy Carter compared Palestinian liberation aspirations to Black American struggles for civil rights, he accepted Young’s resignation.

I reach Maddow at her Massachusetts home during a big week: MSNBC has begun its transition to a new entity that will eventually be called MS NOW. In a wide-ranging conversation, she weighs in on the rebrand, billionaire media moguls, and the resistance movements she’s clocking today.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: Bringing historical context to the present moment is one of the hallmarks of your work. So, why Andrew Young? What about his story speaks to the contemporary American experience?

Rachel Maddow: What I have been trying to teach myself this past year is what we can learn in a really practical sense from the movements that have fought the government doing terrible things.

We have had experiences where Americans organized completely against the odds, with seemingly nothing on their side except the righteousness of their cause and their determination and their skills—and they have succeeded. We tend to look back on these things and remember their achievements, like the Voting Rights Act, or some other big government capitulation. Sometimes we think about something terrible, like an assassination. What we haven’t really done a lot of, in this generation, is talk about what it’s like to walk that walk every day. What sort of role is there for people who aren’t the figurehead, who aren’t the inspiring leader, but instead are trying to help that leader get it done?

The documentary is called Dirty Work because Young says that he often took on jobs other people didn’t want to do, like reaching out to white people during the civil rights movement. What is the dirty work that you think isn’t being done in politics today, but needs to be?

I think that people are doing it, actually. It’s mailing lists, and it’s negotiation that never makes newspapers, and it’s hard decisions about what to focus on and who to listen to and who to box out. When it’s worth talking to people in elective office and when you have to oppose them. It’s just very practical work. You see it happening in the grittier, more grassroots part of the Democratic Party right now. You definitely see it in the protest movement.

The way the film talks about coalition building made me think of Ezra Klein saying, recently, that Democrats need a bigger tent—that they should, for instance, be running anti-choice candidates in certain red states. What do you think of strategies like that?

The Andrew Young story—at least the way that he describes it now, looking back at what he went through—is really instructive, because there is no one-size-fits-all answer. There’s no correct size of the tent that applies to every fight and to every timeframe. I mean, Young is very blunt about people who, from the outside, might be perceived as allies that he didn’t see that way. The right thing to do doesn’t just present itself as a conflict between right and wrong. Organizing and strategizing is difficult and iterative and painful, and some people get left out and some people get elevated. Some people get hurt, and almost everybody [makes] sacrifices.

When you talk about sacrifice, what does that mean in 2025?

What’s happening in the Eastern District of Virginia right now. There’s really dramatic reporting about what the lawyers and prosecutors in that office, and the FBI field agents who work with them, what they’ve been asked to do by a government that is explicitly calling for punitive persecution of the president’s perceived enemies.

There’s this sometimes over-simplistic way that we talk about bravery: When asked to do something against my ethical core or the Constitution, I, of course, will resign on principle! We think about that as a noble thing. But then you see what it really means to say no, not because there’s been some misunderstanding or some glitch in the system, but rather because we now have an authoritarian government that is asking people to do horrific things. People are not just being fired; they’re being threatened, their families are being threatened. There’s an effort by the government, led by the president, to ruin people who have opposed them. Against that malevolent force, the idea of the heroic course isn’t romantic and doesn’t come with swelling strings and big applause. It often just comes with essentially sacrificing everything you thought your life was going to be.

We’re speaking right after MSNBC had its first day as a separate entity from NBC News. It’s been spun off at a time when there’s been a great deal of media consolidation. What do you think about David Ellison reportedly wanting to buy Warner Bros. Discovery?

In general, having a handful of billionaires own all the most important and influential media in the country is just a bad idea for any democracy, and something that we ought to have better antibodies against as a country. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good billionaire or a bad billionaire. It was a terrible idea in the era of the Yellow Press; it was terrible in the William Randolph Hearst days. A terrible idea now. We used to have a government that recognized that, at least in broad strokes, and tried to prevent that kind of consolidation. Obviously, now with an authoritarian government in place, they want that consolidation more than they want anything. It’s Strong Men Rule chapter one, so just systemically, it’s bad.

Do you think there’s a chance Bari Weiss will be able to run CBS News ethically?

[Laughs.] I have no idea. I mean, CBS is a really, really important news organization with a really proud history. I would also say that the Justice Department is a really important institution with a really proud history. I’d say that about USAID. There’s an effort—again, systemically—to destroy important institutions in the country right now. The free and independent news media is certainly right up there, top-tier among them. It’s going to depend on the American people and how much they’re willing to put up with, in terms of any effort to create, effectively, state TV, or a Hungarian Viktor Orbán–style media landscape. I mean, the American people are going to have something to say about that.

You, of course, have covered Jimmy Kimmel’s removal and reinstatement. What do you think that situation says about where we are as a nation?

It was really instructive and interesting as a political strategy and organizing case study. One of the central insights of the civil rights movement that Young talks about in the film is the idea that there was something in the heart of the American people that would recognize the rightness of the cause. That if you were scrupulously nonviolent, your message about equality and dignity and the protections of the Constitution applying to everybody in this country would get through, and would resonate in the heart of the American people in a way that would be unstoppable.

This very small case study of this one late-night TV show host tapped something in the heart of the American people—which is the respect for free speech, and the idea [that] the president should not be able to shut down speech that is critical of him because it bothers him. It resonated like a tuning fork with that very core belief.

The Trump administration was trying to shut down Jimmy Kimmel, but they needed to use the network and the local station groups in order to do it. And while the Trump administration might not have been susceptible to backlash and pressure on this, all of those other entities are subject to public pressure. And all the institutions that have been caving, whether it’s media companies or law firms or universities or Google and Apple and Meta, they ought to be concerned about what the American public thinks about their cowardice. Trump does not care what the American people think about his authoritarian intention. But if he’s going to use the institutions and powerful people in this country to get his way, those institutions and powerful people are going to hear from the American people.

The American public’s trust in media is at an all-time low. What do you think about that? Does that affect the work you do?

Part of the authoritarian project right now is to undermine faith in all sources of authority. This is a political project. This isn’t something that’s just happened organically. MSNBC—MS NOW—we are actually in a pretty good position. We’re hiring, we’re this big news-gathering organization, and we’re building it out right now, for this moment—understanding the dynamics and the pressures that are at work in the media business. There’s a very clear horizon for us in terms of what it means to be both trusted and to, frankly, make money in this environment. We don’t have a lot of debt. We know exactly who we are in terms of our values and what we’re up against. For everything that’s going on in the business, I’d rather be us than any other media entity right now.

In the lead-up to the eventual name change, do you have any thoughts or critiques on the MS NOW name or branding?

I feel like…do you know the Serenity Prayer?

Yes, I do.

We all thought that we were going to keep the name, and then it turns out [NBCUniversal] said we can’t keep the name, so okay. It’s not our call. You can complain about that and have whatever feelings about that. It’s the reality. We’re still going to be called MS. People call us MS, MS NOW, fine. It’s a fixed variable now; none of us can do anything about it. I don’t think it matters that much. Our audience knows who we are, and nothing about us is changing other than our name.

In the big picture, I think the thing that’s important is that nobody’s trying to change us into any other kind of entity. We’re not being taken over by right-wing bloggers, or whatever. We’re still the same old MS.

Focus Features was developing your podcast Bag Man into a film. Is that still in the works?

I have learned the hard way that in everything other than the news business, the creation of new projects and new entities is never a validated and verifiable thing until you actually see the movie. Both Bag Man and Ultra are still in development as movies—when they’re going to be made as movies, I don’t know. But Ben Stiller’s involvement with the Bag Man project has been a great blessing from the very beginning. He has been so personally excellent, both creatively and committed to making it.

I’m doing a million other things. The next podcast is going to come out before the end of the year. I’ve got another book project in the works that’s going to be likely next year. I’ve got a theater project in the works.

What’s your involvement in that?

I am working with a playwright to create an original play.

Cool. Is there anything you can say about what it will be about?

Nope. The development project on that is actually kind of going great. It’s a realistic process. We’re involved with great producers. It’s something totally new for me, but not new for any of the people I’m working with on it. I’ve got a couple of scripted projects. I’ve got a doc series that I’m working on. I’ve got a million things that I’m trying to do.