Rachel Maddow just nailed it

| 3:11 am EST March 6, 2020
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Everyone is still talking about Elizabeth Warren’s explosive Thursday night interview with Rachel Maddow, which saw Warren giving her first public thoughts after dropping out of the 2020 presidential race. Warren made a point of calling out the toxic behavior of Bernie Sanders fans, and Bernie’s own unwillingness or inability to do anything about it. Here’s the thing though: Maddow actually asked the question.

Considering how passionately Warren spoke about the negative role that Bernie’s toxic fan base has played in the 2016 and 2020 elections, there’s a good chance Warren would have brought up the topic of her own volition, either during this interview or during a subsequent media appearance. We’ll never know for sure. But we don’t have to worry about it, because Maddow had the sense to directly ask Warren how she felt about the Bernie trolls.

It’s not just that Maddow had the guts to ask a question that she knew the Bernie-supporting segment of her audience wouldn’t want to hear. It’s that Warren had the awareness to ask about it. Cable news largely exists in its own bubble, focused on a narrow handful of ratings-driven narratives that may or may not even be accurate, and largely cut off from the real world of politics and elections. When I watch MSNBC, it’s often to find out specifically how the public is being misinformed or misled about politics, so I know what to try to correct in my own analysis.

But Rachel Maddow demonstrated that she’s fully aware of the toxic behavior of such a disproportionately large number of Sanders fans, and the negative impact that this trolling has had on the candidacies of everyone from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris to Elizabeth Warren. Maddow asked Warren about it, in the hope that Warren would be willing to elaborate. Sure enough, she was. It a hall of fame moment for TV journalism, and it’s why Maddow is the best at what she does.