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TV host Rachel Maddow has revealed she thinks Fox News host Tucker Carlson is ‘doing great right now,’ how Roger Ailes mentored her and also spoke about being pursued by CNN – only for her agents to balk at the $10 to $15 million salary offer.
In April, Maddow – who first started out by working on the ‘talented’ Carson’s 11 p.m. show on the liberal news network in 2005 – shocked her audience by announcing she’d be hosting ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ on a weekly basis, instead of five nights a week.
NBCUniversal had reportedly offered her $30 million to be on-air one night a week and the flexibility to focus on more long-form projects, like podcasts, specials, documentaries, etc., Vanity Fair reported.
Speaking of her success in an interview with the magazine, Maddow, 49, credited her relationship with late Fox News executive Roger Ailes, describing how he mentored her and helped her.
Jeff Zucker, former president of CNN, wanted to snag Maddow for the now-defunct CNN+, but Maddow and her agents ‘balked’ at the proposed $10 to $15 million salary
‘There’s a sort of, like, respecting the game, in terms of people who are doing well and people who are good at it. I mean that was the basis of my professional friendship with Roger Ailes,’ Maddow said.
‘I wanted tips from him about how to be better on TV. And he was willing to talk to me about what I was doing well, and doing poorly, to help me get better,’ she continued.
Ailes was once a top executive at Fox before more than a dozen women, including host Megyn Kelly, leveled sexual harassment claims against him, forcing him to resign.
Maddow said Carlson has ‘always been talented’ and admitted the Fox News host is ‘doing great right now’
Maddow revealed she was close with Roger Ailes, the late former Fox News executive who was ousted from the company following claims of sexual harassment
Maddow compared her view of the Fox News royalty to baseball players, saying ‘some of those rivalries are bitter rivalries, that doesn’t mean you don’t study the pitching technique of their star pitcher.’
Maddow now wishes to expand her career into different mediums, but disclosed she sifted through a variety of offers before settling.
Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, wanted to snag Maddow for the now-defunct CNN+, but Maddow and her agents ‘balked’ at the proposed $10 to $15 million salary.
Far more lucrative deals were reportedly on the table: SiriusXM was ready to offer Maddow a $40 million deal on the heels of her successful podcast, ‘Bag Man.’
She eventually negotiated the jaw-dropping deal with NBCUniversal to have more creative freedom for her other projects.
‘What I asked for, and I realize it’s a really hard thing to ask for from a big corporate entity, is flexibility, fluidity, and forgiveness,’ she said.
But Maddow stepping away from her show wasn’t immediately beneficial to NBC: During the first week of her hiatus, which began in February, MSNBC’s ratings dropped 26% and stayed down for weeks until she returned in April.
In terms of numbers, Maddow is a cable news heavyweight: She’s responsible for 11% of MSNBC’s total ratings, a higher share than any other solo host on television.
Maddow got her start on television when she featured on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show in 2005
But the toll of doing a nightly news show that, at times, she only had a few hours to prepare for, greatly affected her health.
Maddow claims part of the reason she stepped away was the workload giving her back problems, including seven herniated discs that she deals with via physical therapy.
She says she now has other projects in the works, including ‘two potential movies and two potential TV shows,’ a book and a podcast.
Fellow hosts at MSNBC were delighted to hear Maddow decided to stay with the network.
Joy-Ann Reid said ‘we all felt that kind of pit-in-the-stomach panic,’ and admitted she’s delighted Maddow is ‘staying in any capacity.’
Chris Hayes, host of ‘All In with Chris Hayes,’ said ‘the fact that she’s not leaving makes it feel less seismic. If it was like “oh, now she’s at CNN,” it would be different.’
Maddow has made several missteps in her career on television, most noticeably her consistent attempts to sensationalize the notorious Steele dossier, which reportedly implicated former president Donald Trump in a Russian collusion scheme.
The dossier was found to be inaccurate and many publications, including The New York Times, insisted their journalists do not appear on her show.
Maddow says this informal embargo ended and called the publication ‘sad,’ after ‘they just quietly changed their minds without ever saying why they changed their minds.’
She claims the attempts to paint her as a conspiracy theorist in regards to the dossier ‘is a revisionist history designed to intimidate people out of covering stories like that in the future.’
She continued that the efforts were made to ‘obscure the seriousness of what Russia did, and what the Trump campaign’s relationship was with what Russia did.’
Maddow also admitted she steers clear of physical publications and cable news when she informs herself, and sticks to digital publications.