Rachel Maddow Takes Pay Cut With MSNBC's Future in Jeopardy

[Hekate]

66. I find it so interesting that so many people belittle the time it takes to prepare a lecture...

My husband is a retired teacher, and used to spend about 6 days a week preparing his lectures — researching new material, reading new textbooks, thinking of new ways to get the subjects across. For 3 or 4 lectures a week he worked untold hours in preparation in his home office, more hours in his college office with appointments, and so on. He didn’t teach during summers, but other than that his days were much the same — prepping, learning. He never really retired from working — he went back into the industry when he stopped teaching at 65.

Do people think Rachel Maddow walks onto the set and bullshits off the top of her head? That someone else feeds a batch of notes into the teleprompter? Even if I didn't know she had a PhD and was a Rhodes Scholar, I could still detect the huge amount of research that goes into her programs — the one day a week at the MSNBC studio (that we know of — after all, she has a team she directs) , the multipart specials, the multipart podcasts. Every one of them requiring volumes of research, days of reading, writing, thinking. She’s meticulous, and it shows.

I don’t set salaries for any industry, much less TV and cable newscasting — but those businesses make money hand over fist. Should the bosses keep it all, and dole out salaries of $100,000/year — maybe $200,000? Or should they allow their best employees to negotiate for an equitable share of the pie? Why would that make her negotiated salary “obscene” as someone called it? Why isn’t Rachel as valuable as, say, a football player?