Never Expected To Be in Media – Rachel Maddow

In an exclusive Berkeley interview with a high school newspaper, MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow spoke of the difficulty of growing up gay in her hometown of Castro Valley and of how she fell, as if by accident, onto the career path that would lead to her having the top-rated prime-time news show on MSNBC.

"I never thought that I was going to end up in media," she told a reporter for the The Olympian, the student paper at , where Maddow gave the commencement address at her 1990 graduation.

"That was never in the cards for me at all," Maddow said in the interview before her talk about her new book, Drift: The Unmooring of Political Military Power. "It's not what I was aiming at."

The reporter, Anna Balassone, had asked why Maddow – who had been a triple-sport athlete in basketball, volleyball and swimming at Castro Valley High – hadn't taken journalism or written for the school paper.

"I'm not sure that I had a thing that I was aiming at when I was in high school," Maddow continued. "...It (going into media) was as much a surprise to me as I think it was to anybody else who knew me when I started doing radio when I was like 26."

She explained that she was pursuing a Ph.D. at Oxford but hadn't finished her dissertation when she ran out of time and money and was obliged to returned to the United States. She lived with friends "doing odd jobs to pay the rent" – landscaping, deliveries, unloading trucks, working at a coffee-roasting plant.

"I was doing all sorts of crazy stuff," she said.

The happenstance that changed her life came from the friends, she said.

"The friends I was living with were fans of a local show – one of those wacky  'Come-on-down, crazy morning-zoo' morning shows, and the sidekick on that show, the woman who had to read the news ..., was leaving, and they held open, on-air auditions to replace her."

"And my friends who I was living with dared me to go do it, and I had nuttin' better to do, so I did it. And I got the job and I started the next day."

"It's not a career plan I would recommend," she added.

The interview took place at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where Maddow spoke on April 13. Joining Balassone were student members of a film crew – Lily Carrell, Suzanna Chak, Rebecca Fong and Melody Moteabbed – along with their advisor, Matt Johanson.

The video of the interview attached to this article is by Analisa Harangozo, editor of Castro Valley Patch, where the video was first published.