Carlson "has always been talented," Maddow told Vanity Fair, recalling her time working on "his 11 o’clock show on MSNBC that nobody remembers."
The remarks came as Maddow was concerned with the televised political commentary and news industry, which the author expressed her view on as "less fatalistic, if a bit jaded."
Maddow recently discussed a multimillion-dollar contract with MSNBC, letting her to go on air only once a week. Before that, the host had been on a months-long recess.
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"Like, Tucker’s doing great right now," she said. “But look at Tucker’s career. The first show I worked on was his 11 o’clock show on MSNBC that nobody remembers. But he was always kicking around the business and has always been talented. It just — this turned out to be his moment.”
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Maddow also outlined running into Carlson at an event after not seeing one another for a long period of time. “It was really nice to see him," she said.
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The famous host explained that she is able to look at what Carlson does with a degree of separation like one would analyze a baseball game.
"If you think about baseball players,” Maddow said, “who are extremely competitive and who are fighting to win and who have rivalries, and some of those rivalries are bitter rivalries, that doesn’t mean you don’t study the pitching technique of their star pitcher. It doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate whatever they’re doing in terms of, you know, where they put their shortstop in order to give them a better defense."
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"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. 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.
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"More than the issue of, you know, how dangerous are Tucker’s ideas, and how do they interact with the growth of the authoritarian Right in the Republican Party, more so than that question, which is obviously what the central thrust of the reporting was about, I was interested in how they deconstructed why it works," she explained.
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