Rachel Maddow's peaceable kingdom

Rachel Maddow showed up at TV Press Tour today, and that's good, because she was scheduled to. Maddow's MSNBC show was an instant hit - she routinely kicks Larry King's @ss, but then, really, who among us couldn't?

What's remarkable about Maddow's show is that it's a bluster-free zone, which is virtually unheard-of in the cable-news universe. Her show's smart and funny without ever raising its voice; its success would suggest that other cable-news shows would be wise to follow her lead.

So I asked her about this. And she answered:

"I can't speak too much to what it is like to experience other people's shows as a viewer because I don't watch much TV. But I do know what it was like to be a guest on other people's shows where, for a very long time, I was in the wilderness, where it was -- I was Punch and they were also booking Judy, or I was Judy and they were also booking Punch. And it didn't really matter what we were talking about, as long as we were going to fight.

"We were essentially
-- it was sort of boxing masquerading as news. I was in that position for a long time in a lot of different environments on a lot of different networks, and sometimes I was good at it, and sometimes I wasn't, and sometimes it was demoralizing, and sometimes it was fun. But I knew -- when it became even remotely possible that I might be able to host, I knew that I would not pay that forward, that I would not be hosting 'Punch and Judy' shows at all.

"Plenty of places to get it. It's not going to die. There's a reason people book it that way. A -- it's very easy. B -- the host has no real role, so they can relax and have a smoke. And C -- it does actually -- kinetic activity does draw eyeballs. I don't learn anything from that process. I don't -- sometimes you learn how to argue well, but that's kind of it. And I honestly sort of want to learn something. I want to have there be a reason that we've taken up that time on this precious broadcast medium that we've got. So I don't host that.

"I certainly have give-and-take with my guests, but it's going to be one-on-one. It's going to be civil. I'm not going to tell anybody to shut up unless they say something about my mom or something else that I can't control myself about. But other than that, [civil discourse is] the way that I want to take in information."