The media will be on trial in November’s presidential election. Maddow, dressed in a black jacket, turned-up jeans, camo trainers and her trademark black-rimmed specs, spots my voice recorder – a vintage Tascam device that resembles a Taser – and snaps a photo of it with her phone, lest it be useful to her team. With bookshelves overflowing – the Mueller report, examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, lies on a crate below – and ideas scribbled on whiteboards, it is the den of a promiscuous intellect. Crutches are propped up in a corner “as a talisman” – she broke her ankle last year in a fishing accident. Inside, a Russian doll bearing Vladimir Putin’s face rests on a bookcase. Photograph: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesĪt a receptionist’s desk outside her understated office in New York’s art deco Rockefeller Center sits a decaying lifesize waxwork of the former Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Maddow on set in 2008, in her first week on air. ‘My job is to try to figure out what is and isn’t reliable information’. A practising Catholic as well as the first openly gay host of a US primetime news programme, she has suffered cycles of depression all her life and enjoys fishing, shooting and reading Robert Harris historical yarns. There is, of course, much more to Maddow than her screen persona. She dedicates her new book, Blowout, which explores the pernicious influence of the global oil and gas industry, “to the bots and trolls, all of you, with love”.

Even ideological fellow travellers worry that she is “strident” and “shrill”. Maddow is demonised as an avatar of the “liberal elite” and “Trump derangement syndrome”. The view from the right is rather different. “Her figure has ascended, in the liberal imagination, from beloved cable news host to a kind of oracle for the age of Trump,” the New York Times Magazine noted recently, describing her show as the “gathering place for a congregation of liberals hungering for an antidote to President Trump’s nihilism and disregard for civic norms”.

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